History
Adding a picture into an existing picture was done long before affordable PiP was available on consumer products. The first PiP was seen on the televised coverage of the 1976 Montreal Olympics where a Quantel digital framestore device was used to insert a close-up picture of the Olympic flame during the opening ceremony. In 1980, NEC introduced its "Popvision" television (CV-20T74P) in Japan with a rudimentary picture-aside-picture feature: a separate 6" (15 cm) CRT and tuner complemented the set's main 20" (50 cm) screen. It was pricey: its ¥298,000 MSRP was equal to about $1,200 (at $1 = ¥250 ), and $1,200 in 1980 had the approximate buying power of $3,000 in 2007 .
An early consumer implementation of picture-in-picture was the Multivision set-top box; it was not a commercial success. Later PiP became available as a feature of advanced television receivers.
The first wide spread consumer implementation of picture-in-picture was produced by Philips in 1983 in their high end television sets. A separate video or RF input was available on the back of the set and displayed in black and white in one or the four corners of the screen. Televisions at the time were still analog format and earlier versions of the PiP implemented in analog were too costly. New digital technology allowed the second video signal to be digitized and save in a digital memory chip then replayed in a mini version. While the new technology was not good enough for color or full screen viewing it did provide a low cost PiP feature.
The Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD specifications included picture in picture, allowing viewers to see, say, the director's comment on a film they are watching. All of the Blu-ray Disc titles in 2006 and 2007 that had a PiP track used two separate HD encodings with one of the HD encodings including a hard coded PiP track. Starting in 2008 Blu-ray Disc titles started being released that use one HD and one SD video track which can be combined together with a Bonus View or BD-Live player. This method uses less disc space allowing for PiP to be more easily added to a title. Several studios have released Bonus View PiP Blu-ray Disc titles in 2008 such as Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, Resident Evil: Extinction, V for Vendetta, and War.
Read more about this topic: Picture-in-picture
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)