text:
December 22

Pre-1600

 * AD 69 – Vespasian is proclaimed Emperor of Rome; his predecessor, Vitellius, attempts to abdicate but is captured and killed at the Gemonian stairs.
 * 401 – Pope Innocent I is elected, the only pope to succeed his father in the office.
 * 856 – Damghan earthquake: An earthquake near the Persian city of Damghan kills an estimated 200,000 people, the sixth deadliest earthquake in recorded history.
 * 880 – Luoyang, eastern capital of the Tang dynasty, is captured by rebel leader Huang Chao during the reign of Emperor Xizong.
 * 1135 – Three weeks after the death of King Henry I of England, Stephen of Blois claims the throne and is privately crowned King of England, beginning the English Anarchy.
 * 1216 – Pope Honorius III approves the Dominican Order through the papal bull of confirmation Religiosam vitam.
 * 1489 – The forces of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, take control of Almería from the Nasrid ruler of Granada, Muhammad XIII.

1601–1900

 * 1769 – Sino-Burmese War: The war ends with the Qing dynasty withdrawing from Burma forever.
 * 1788 – Nguyễn Huệ proclaims himself Emperor Quang Trung, in effect abolishing on his own the Lê dynasty.
 * 1790 – The Turkish fortress of Izmail is stormed and captured by Alexander Suvorov and his Russian armies.
 * 1807 – The Embargo Act, forbidding trade with all foreign countries, is passed by the U.S. Congress at the urging of President Thomas Jefferson.
 * 1808 – Ludwig van Beethoven conducts and performs in concert at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna, with the premiere of his Fifth Symphony, Sixth Symphony, Fourth Piano Concerto and Choral Fantasy.
 * 1851 – India's first freight train is operated in Roorkee, to transport material for the construction of the Ganges Canal.
 * 1851  – The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., burns.
 * 1864 – American Civil War: Savannah, Georgia, falls to the Union's Army of the Tennessee, and General Sherman tells President Abraham Lincoln: "I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah".
 * 1885 – Itō Hirobumi, a samurai, becomes the first Prime Minister of Japan.
 * 1888 – The Christmas Meeting of 1888, considered to be the official start of the Faroese independence movement.
 * 1890 – Cornwallis Valley Railway begins operation between Kentville and Kingsport, Nova Scotia.
 * 1891 – Asteroid 323 Brucia becomes the first asteroid discovered using photography.
 * 1894 – The Dreyfus affair begins in France, when Alfred Dreyfus is wrongly convicted of treason.

1901–present

 * 1906 – An 7.9 earthquake strikes Xinjiang, China, killing at least 280.
 * 1920 – The GOELRO economic development plan is adopted by the 8th Congress of Soviets of the Russian SFSR.
 * 1921 – Opening of Visva-Bharati College, also known as Santiniketan College, now Visva Bharati University, India.
 * 1937 – The Lincoln Tunnel opens to traffic in New York City.
 * 1939 – Indian Muslims observe a "Day of Deliverance" to celebrate the resignations of members of the Indian National Congress over their not having been consulted over the decision to enter World War II with the United Kingdom.
 * 1940 – World War II: Himara is captured by the Greek army.
 * 1942 – World War II: Adolf Hitler signs the order to develop the V-2 rocket as a weapon.
 * 1944 – World War II: Battle of the Bulge: German troops demand the surrender of United States troops at Bastogne, Belgium, prompting the famous one word reply by General Anthony McAuliffe: "Nuts!"
 * 1944  – World War II: The People's Army of Vietnam is formed to resist Japanese occupation of Indochina, now Vietnam.
 * 1945 – U.S. President Harry S. Truman issues an executive order giving World War II refugees precedence in visa applications under U.S. immigration quotas.
 * 1948 – Sjafruddin Prawiranegara established the Emergency Government of the Republic of Indonesia (Pemerintah Darurat Republik Indonesia, PDRI) in West Sumatra.
 * 1963 – The cruise ship Lakonia burns 180 mi north of Madeira, Portugal with the loss of 128 lives.
 * 1964 – The first test flight of the SR-71 (Blackbird) takes place at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, United States.
 * 1965 – In the United Kingdom, a 70 mph speed limit is applied to all rural roads including motorways for the first time.
 * 1968 – Cultural Revolution: People's Daily posted the instructions of Mao Zedong that "The intellectual youth must go to the country, and will be educated from living in rural poverty."
 * 1971 – The international aid organization Doctors Without Borders is founded by Bernard Kouchner and a group of journalists in Paris, France.
 * 1973 – A Royal Air Maroc Sud Aviation Caravelle crashes near Tangier-Boukhalef Airport in Tangier, Morocco, killing 106.
 * 1974 – Grande Comore, Anjouan and Mohéli vote to become the independent nation of Comoros. Mayotte remains under French administration.
 * 1974  – The house of former British Prime Minister Edward Heath is attacked by members of the Provisional IRA.
 * 1975 – U.S. President Gerald Ford creates the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in response to the 1970s energy crisis.
 * 1978 – The pivotal Third Plenum of the 11th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is held in Beijing, with Deng Xiaoping reversing Mao-era policies to pursue a program for Chinese economic reform.
 * 1984 – "Subway vigilante" Bernhard Goetz shoots four would-be muggers on a 2 express train in Manhattan section of New York, United States.
 * 1987 – In Zimbabwe, the political parties ZANU and ZAPU reach an agreement that ends the violence in the Matabeleland region known as the Gukurahundi.
 * 1989 – Romanian Revolution: Communist President of Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu is overthrown by Ion Iliescu after days of bloody confrontations. The deposed dictator and his wife Elena flee Bucharest in a helicopter as protesters erupt in cheers.
 * 1989  – German reunification: Berlin's Brandenburg Gate re-opens after nearly 30 years, effectively ending the division of East and West Germany.
 * 1990 – Lech Wałęsa is elected President of Poland.
 * 1990  – Final independence of Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia after termination of trusteeship.
 * 1992 – During approach to Tripoli International Airport, a Boeing 727 operating as Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 1103 collides in mid-air with a Libyan Air Force Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-23, killing 157 people.
 * 1996 – Airborne Express Flight 827 crashes in Narrows, Virginia, killing all six people on board.
 * 1997 – Acteal massacre: Attendees at a prayer meeting of Roman Catholic activists for indigenous causes in the small village of Acteal in the Mexican state of Chiapas are massacred by paramilitary forces.
 * 1997  – Somali Civil War: Hussein Farrah Aidid relinquishes the disputed title of President of Somalia by signing the Cairo Declaration, in Cairo, Egypt. It is the first major step towards reconciliation in Somalia since 1991.
 * 1999 – Just after taking off from London Stansted Airport, Korean Air Cargo Flight 8509 crashes into Hatfield Forest near Great Hallingbury, killing all four people on board.
 * 2001 – Burhanuddin Rabbani, political leader of the Northern Alliance, hands over power in Islamic State of Afghanistan to the interim government headed by President Hamid Karzai.
 * 2001  – Richard Reid attempts to destroy a passenger airliner by igniting explosives hidden in his shoes aboard American Airlines Flight 63.
 * 2008 – An ash dike ruptured at a solid waste containment area for a Tennessee Valley Authority coal-fired power plant in Roane County, Tennessee, releasing 1.1 e9USgal of coal fly ash slurry in the largest industrial spill in U.S. history.
 * 2010 – The repeal of the Don't ask, don't tell policy, the 17-year-old policy banning homosexuals serving openly in the United States military, is signed into law by President Barack Obama.
 * 2012 – Bashir Ahmad Bilour of Awami National Party and eight others are killed in a Pakistan Taliban bomber suicide attack in Dhaki Nalbandi area near Qissa Khwani Bazaar.
 * 2016 – A study finds the VSV-EBOV vaccine against the Ebola virus between 70 and 100% effective, thus making it the first proven vaccine against the disease.
 * 2017 – United Nations Security Council Resolution 2397 against North Korea is unanimously approved.
 * 2017  – President Donald Trump signs the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
 * 2018 – A tsunami caused by an eruption of Anak Krakatau in Indonesia kills at least 430 people and injures almost a thousand more.
 * 2018  – The 2018–2019 United States federal government shutdown, the longest shutdown of the U.S. federal government in history, begins.

Pre-1600

 * 244 – Diocletian, Roman emperor (d. 311)
 * 948 – Kang Kam-ch'an, Korean official and general (d. 1031)
 * 1095 – Roger II of Sicily (d. 1154)
 * 1178 – Emperor Antoku of Japan (d. 1185)
 * 1183 – Chagatai Khan, Mongol ruler (d. 1242)
 * 1300 – Khutughtu Khan Kusala, Mongolian emperor (d. 1329)
 * 1459 – Sultan Cem, Ottoman politician (d. 1495)
 * 1546 – Kuroda Yoshitaka, Japanese daimyō (d. 1604)
 * 1550 – Cesare Cremonini, Italian philosopher and author (d. 1631)
 * 1569 – Étienne Martellange, French architect (d. 1641)
 * 1591 – Tommaso Dingli, Maltese architect and sculptor (d. 1666)

1601–1900

 * 1639 – Jean Racine, French poet and playwright (d. 1699)
 * 1666 – Guru Gobind Singh, Indian guru and poet (d. 1708)
 * 1694 – Hermann Samuel Reimarus, German philosopher and academic (d. 1768)
 * 1696 – James Oglethorpe, English general and politician, 1st Colonial Governor of Georgia (d. 1785)
 * 1723 – Carl Friedrich Abel, German viol player and composer (d. 1787)
 * 1765 – Johann Friedrich Pfaff, German mathematician and academic (d. 1825)
 * 1799 – Nicholas Callan, Irish priest and physicist (d. 1864)
 * 1805 – John Obadiah Westwood, English entomologist and archaeologist (d. 1893)
 * 1807 – Johan Sebastian Welhaven, Norwegian author, poet, and critic (d. 1873)
 * 1819 – Franz Abt, German composer and conductor (d. 1870)
 * 1819  – Pierre Ossian Bonnet, French mathematician and academic (d. 1892)
 * 1839 – John Nevil Maskelyne, English magician (d. 1917)
 * 1850 – Victoriano Huerta, Mexican general and politician, 35th President of Mexico (d. 1916)
 * 1853 – Teresa Carreño, Venezuelan-American singer-songwriter and pianist (d. 1917)
 * 1853  – Evgraf Fedorov, Russian mathematician, crystallographer, and mineralogist (d. 1919)
 * 1853  – Sarada Devi, Indian mystic and philosopher (d. 1920)
 * 1856 – Frank B. Kellogg, American lawyer and politician, 45th United States Secretary of State, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1937)
 * 1858 – Giacomo Puccini, Italian composer and educator (d. 1924)
 * 1862 – Connie Mack, American baseball player and manager (d. 1956)
 * 1865 – Charles Sands, American golfer and tennis player (d. 1945)
 * 1868 – Jaan Tõnisson, Estonian journalist, lawyer, and politician, 2nd Prime Minister of Estonia (d. 1941?)
 * 1869 – Dmitri Egorov, Russian mathematician and academic (d. 1931)
 * 1869  – Edwin Arlington Robinson, American poet and playwright (d. 1935)
 * 1872 – Camille Guérin, French veterinarian and bacteriologist (d. 1961)
 * 1874 – Franz Schmidt, Austrian cellist, pianist, and composer (d. 1939)
 * 1876 – Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Egyptian-Italian poet and composer (d. 1944)
 * 1878 – Myer Prinstein, Polish-American jumper (d. 1925)
 * 1880 – Fred Woolley, Australian rugby league player (d. 1955)
 * 1883 – Marcus Hurley, American cyclist (d. 1941)
 * 1883  – Edgard Varèse, French-American composer (d. 1965)
 * 1884 – St. Elmo Brady, African American chemist and educator (d. 1966)
 * 1885 – Deems Taylor, American conductor and critic (d. 1966)
 * 1887 – Srinivasa Ramanujan, Indian mathematician and theorist (d. 1920)
 * 1888 – J. Arthur Rank, 1st Baron Rank, English businessman, founded Rank Organisation (d. 1972)
 * 1889 – George Hutson, English runner and soldier (d. 1914)
 * 1892 – Herman Potočnik, Slovenian-Austrian engineer (d. 1929)
 * 1894 – Edwin Linkomies, Finnish academic, professor and the Prime Minister of Finland (d. 1963)
 * 1898 – Vladimir Fock, Russian physicist and mathematician (d. 1974)
 * 1899 – Gustaf Gründgens, German actor and director (d. 1963)
 * 1900 – Marc Allégret, French director and screenwriter (d. 1973)

1901–present

 * 1901 – Andre Kostelanetz, Russian-American conductor and composer (d. 1980)
 * 1903 – Haldan Keffer Hartline, American physiologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1983)
 * 1905 – Pierre Brasseur, French-Italian actor and screenwriter (d. 1972)
 * 1905  – Pierre Levegh, French ice hockey player and racing driver (d. 1955)
 * 1905  – Kenneth Rexroth, American poet, translator, and academic (d. 1982)
 * 1907 – Peggy Ashcroft, English actress (d. 1991)
 * 1908 – Giacomo Manzù, Italian sculptor and academic (d. 1991)
 * 1909 – Patricia Hayes, English actress (d. 1998)
 * 1911 – Danny O'Dea, English actor (d. 2003)
 * 1912 – Elias Degiannis, Greek commander (d. 1943)
 * 1912  – Lady Bird Johnson, American beautification activist;  38th First Lady of the United States (d. 2007)
 * 1913 – Giorgio Oberweger, Italian discus thrower and hurdler (d. 1998)
 * 1915 – Barbara Billingsley, American actress (d. 2010)
 * 1915  – Phillip Glasier, English author and academic (d. 2000)
 * 1917 – Gene Rayburn, American game show host and actor (d. 1999)
 * 1921 – Dimitri Fampas, Greek guitarist and composer (d. 1996)
 * 1921  – Hawkshaw Hawkins, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1963)
 * 1922 – Ruth Roman, American actress (d. 1999)
 * 1922  – Jim Wright, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 56th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives (d. 2015)
 * 1923 – Peregrine Worsthorne, English journalist and author (d. 2020)
 * 1924 – Frank Corsaro, American actor and director (d. 2017)
 * 1925 – Lewis Glucksman, American businessman and philanthropist (d. 2006)
 * 1925  – Lefter Küçükandonyadis, Turkish footballer and manager (d. 2012)
 * 1926 – Alcides Ghiggia, Italian-Uruguayan footballer and manager (d. 2015)
 * 1926  – Roberta Leigh, English writer, artist and TV producer (d. 2014)
 * 1928 – Fredrik Barth, German-Norwegian anthropologist and academic (d. 2016)
 * 1929 – Wazir Mohammad, Indian-Pakistani cricketer
 * 1930 – Ardalion Ignatyev, Russian sprinter and educator (d. 1998)
 * 1931 – Gisela Birkemeyer, German hurdler and coach (d. 2024)
 * 1931  – Carlos Graça, São Toméan lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of São Tomé and Príncipe (d. 2013)
 * 1932 – Phil Woosnam, Welsh soccer player and manager (d. 2013)
 * 1933 – John Hartle, English motorcycle racer (d. 1968)
 * 1934 – David Pearson, American race car driver (d. 2018)
 * 1935 – Paulo Rocha, Portuguese director and screenwriter (d. 2012)
 * 1936 – James Burke, Irish historian and author
 * 1936  – Héctor Elizondo, American actor and director
 * 1937 – Charlotte Lamb, English author (d. 2000)
 * 1937  – Eduard Uspensky, Russian author, poet, and playwright (d. 2018)
 * 1937  – Ken Whitmore, English author and playwright
 * 1938 – Matty Alou, Dominican-American baseball player and scout (d. 2011)
 * 1938  – Lucien Bouchard, Canadian lawyer and politician, 27th Premier of Quebec
 * 1938  – Red Steagall, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, actor, and poet
 * 1940 – Luis Francisco Cuéllar, Colombian rancher and politician (d. 2009)
 * 1940  – Mike Molloy, English journalist, author, and illustrator
 * 1942 – Jerry Koosman, American baseball player
 * 1942  – Dick Parry, English saxophonist
 * 1943 – Stefan Janos, Slovak-Swiss physicist and academic
 * 1943  – Paul Wolfowitz, American banker and politician, 25th United States Deputy Secretary of Defense
 * 1944 – Mary Archer, English chemist and academic
 * 1944  – Steve Carlton, American baseball player
 * 1944  – Barry Jenkins, English drummer
 * 1945 – Frances Lannon, English historian and academic
 * 1945  – Sam Newman, Australian footballer and sportscaster
 * 1945  – Diane Sawyer, American journalist
 * 1946 – Roger Carr, English businessman
 * 1946  – C. Eugene Steuerle, American economist and author
 * 1947 – Brian Daley, American author and screenwriter (d. 1996)
 * 1947  – Dilip Doshi, Indian cricketer
 * 1948 – Steve Garvey, American baseball player and sportscaster
 * 1948  – Don Kardong, American runner, journalist, and author
 * 1948  – Rick Nielsen, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
 * 1948  – Chris Old, English cricketer and coach
 * 1948  – Lynne Thigpen, American actress and singer (d. 2003)
 * 1949 – Maurice Gibb, Manx-English singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2003)
 * 1949  – Robin Gibb, Manx-English singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2012)
 * 1949  – Ray Guy, American football player (d. 2022)
 * 1950 – Manfred Moore, American football player and rugby league player (d. 2020)
 * 1951 – Lasse Bengtsson, Swedish journalist
 * 1951  – Charles de Lint, Dutch-Canadian author and critic
 * 1951  – Gerald Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster, British landowner, businessman and philanthropist (d. 2016)
 * 1951  – Tony Isabella, American comic book writer, editor, actor, artist and critic
 * 1951  – Jan Stephenson, Australian golfer
 * 1952 – Sandra Kalniete, Latvian politician and diplomat, former Latvian Minister of Foreign Affairs
 * 1953 – Ian Turnbull, Canadian ice hockey player
 * 1953  – Tom Underwood, American baseball player (d. 2010)
 * 1954 – Hideshi Matsuda, Japanese racing driver
 * 1954  – Derick Parry, Nevisian cricketer
 * 1955 – Galina Murašova, Lithuanian discus thrower
 * 1955  – Lonnie Smith, American baseball player
 * 1955  – Thomas C. Südhof, German-American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
 * 1956 – Jane Lighting, English businesswoman
 * 1957 – Stephen Conway, English bishop
 * 1957  – Carole James, English-Canadian educator and politician
 * 1957  – Peter Mortimer, Australian rugby league player
 * 1958 – Frank Gambale, Australian guitarist, songwriter, and producer
 * 1958  – David Heavener, American singer-songwriter, producer, actor, and director
 * 1959 – Bernd Schuster, German footballer and manager
 * 1960 – Jean-Michel Basquiat, American painter and poet (d. 1988)
 * 1960  – Luther Campbell, American rapper and actor
 * 1960  – Paul Kuniholm, Artist
 * 1961 – Yuri Malenchenko, Russian colonel, pilot, and astronaut
 * 1962 – Ralph Fiennes, English actor
 * 1963 – Giuseppe Bergomi, Italian footballer and coach
 * 1963  – Brian McMillan, South African cricketer and educator
 * 1963  – Luna H. Mitani, Japanese-American painter and illustrator
 * 1964 – Mike Jackson, American baseball player
 * 1964  – Simon Kirby, English businessman and politician
 * 1965 – David S. Goyer, American screenwriter
 * 1965  – Urszula Włodarczyk, Polish heptathlete and triple jumper
 * 1966 – Dmitry Bilozerchev, Russian gymnast and coach
 * 1966  – Marcel Schirmer, German singer-songwriter and bass player
 * 1966  – David Wright, English lawyer and politician
 * 1967 – Richey Edwards, Welsh singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1995)
 * 1967  – Stéphane Gendron, Canadian lawyer and politician
 * 1967  – Rebecca Harris, English businesswoman and politician
 * 1967  – Dan Petrescu, Romanian footballer and manager
 * 1968 – Emre Aracı, Turkish composer, conductor, and historian
 * 1968  – Luis Hernández, Mexican footballer
 * 1968  – Lori McKenna, American singer-songwriter
 * 1968  – Dina Meyer, American actress
 * 1969 – Myriam Bédard, Canadian biathlete
 * 1969  – Mark Robins, English footballer and manager
 * 1970 – Gary Anderson, Scottish darts player
 * 1970  – Ted Cruz, Canadian-American lawyer and politician
 * 1971 – Ajeenkya Patil, Indian economist and academic
 * 1972 – Mark Hill, English musician, producer and songwriter
 * 1972  – Kirk Maltby, Canadian ice hockey player and scout
 * 1972  – Vanessa Paradis, French singer-songwriter and actress
 * 1974 – Rei Hance, American actress
 * 1975 – Sergei Aschwanden, Swiss martial artist
 * 1975  – Dmitri Khokhlov, Russian footballer and manager
 * 1975  – Marcin Mięciel, Polish footballer
 * 1975  – Stanislav Neckář, Czech ice hockey player
 * 1975  – Takuya Onishi, Japanese astronaut
 * 1976 – Katleen De Caluwé, Belgian sprinter
 * 1976  – Jason Lane, American baseball player and coach
 * 1976  – Aya Takano, Japanese author and illustrator
 * 1977 – Steve Kariya, Canadian ice hockey player and coach
 * 1978 – Danny Ahn, South Korean singer
 * 1978  – Joy Ali, Fijian boxer (d. 2015)
 * 1978  – Emmanuel Olisadebe, Nigerian-Polish footballer
 * 1979 – Jamie Langfield, Scottish footballer and coach
 * 1980 – Chris Carmack, American actor, singer, and model
 * 1980  – Marcus Haislip, American basketball player
 * 1981 – Marina Kuptsova, Russian high jumper
 * 1982 – Britta Heidemann, German fencer
 * 1982  – Alinne Moraes, Brazilian actress and model
 * 1983 – José Fonte, Portuguese footballer
 * 1983  – Doc Gallows, American wrestler
 * 1983  – Viola Kibiwot, Kenyan runner
 * 1984 – Basshunter, Swedish singer, record producer and DJ
 * 1984  – Greg Finley, American actor
 * 1986 – Dennis Armfield, Australian footballer
 * 1986  – Fatih Öztürk, Turkish footballer
 * 1987 – Zack Britton, American baseball player
 * 1987  – Éder, Bissau-Portuguese footballer
 * 1988 – Scott Darling, American ice hockey player
 * 1988  – Mohamed El Shenawy, Egyptian footballer
 * 1988  – Leigh Halfpenny, Welsh rugby player
 * 1989 – Jordin Sparks, American singer-songwriter and actress
 * 1989  – Jacob Stallings, American baseball player
 * 1990 – Jean-Baptiste Maunier, French actor and singer
 * 1991 – DaBaby, American rapper
 * 1992 – Michaela Hončová, Slovak tennis player
 * 1992  – Nick Johnson, American basketball player
 * 1992  – Moonbyul, South Korean rapper, vocalist and songwriter
 * 1993 – Raphaël Guerreiro, Portuguese footballer
 * 1993  – Meghan Trainor, American singer-songwriter and producer
 * 1994 – Rúben Lameiras, Portuguese footballer
 * 1998 – G Hannelius, American actress and singer
 * 1998  – Casper Ruud, Norwegian tennis player
 * 2000 – Joshua Bassett, American actor and singer
 * 2001 – Camila Osorio, Colombian tennis player
 * 2006 – Callan McKenna, Scottish footballer; goalkeeper at AFC Bournemouth

Pre-1600

 * AD 69 – Vitellius, Roman emperor (b. 15)
 * 731 – Yuan Qianyao, official of the Chinese Tang dynasty
 * 1012 – Baha' al-Dawla, Buyid amir of Iraq
 * 1060 – Cynesige, Archbishop of York
 * 1100 – Bretislav II of Bohemia (b. 1060)
 * 1115 – Olaf Magnusson, King of Norway (b. 1099)
 * 1419 – Antipope John XXIII
 * 1530 – Willibald Pirckheimer, German lawyer and author (b. 1470)
 * 1554 – Alessandro Bonvicino, Italian painter (b. 1498)
 * 1572 – François Clouet, French miniaturist (b. c. 1510)

1601–1900

 * 1603 – Mehmed III, Ottoman sultan (b. 1566)
 * 1641 – Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully, 2nd Prime Minister of France (b. 1560)
 * 1646 – Petro Mohyla, Ruthenian metropolitan and saint (b. 1596)
 * 1660 – André Tacquet, Flemish priest and mathematician (b. 1612)
 * 1666 – Guercino, Italian painter (b. 1591)
 * 1681 – Richard Alleine, English minister and author (b. 1611)
 * 1767 – John Newbery, English publisher (b. 1713)
 * 1788 – Percivall Pott, English physician and surgeon (b. 1714)
 * 1806 – William Vernon, English-American merchant (b. 1719)
 * 1828 – William Hyde Wollaston, English chemist and physicist (b. 1766)
 * 1853 – Manuel María Lombardini, Mexican general and politician. President (1853) (b. 1802)
 * 1867 – Jean-Victor Poncelet, French mathematician and engineer (b. 1788)
 * 1870 – Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Spanish journalist, poet, and playwright (b. 1836)
 * 1880 – George Eliot, English novelist and poet (b. 1819)
 * 1884 – John Chisum, American cattle baron (b. 1824)
 * 1891 – Paul de Lagarde, German biblical scholar and orientalist (b. 1827)
 * 1899 – Dwight L. Moody, American evangelist and publisher, founded Moody Publishers (b. 1837)

1901–present

 * 1902 – Richard von Krafft-Ebing, German-Austrian psychiatrist and author (b. 1840)
 * 1915 – Rose Talbot Bullard, American medical doctor and professor (b. 1864)
 * 1917 – Frances Xavier Cabrini, Italian-American nun and saint (b. 1850)
 * 1918 – Aristeidis Moraitinis, Greek lieutenant and pilot (b. 1891)
 * 1919 – Hermann Weingärtner, German gymnast (b. 1864)
 * 1924 – Karl Denke, German serial killer and cannibal (b. 1860)
 * 1925 – Amelie Beese, German pilot and engineer (b. 1886)
 * 1939 – Ma Rainey, American singer (b. 1886)
 * 1940 – Nathanael West, American author and screenwriter (b. 1903)
 * 1941 – Karel Hašler, Czech actor, director, composer, and screenwriter (b. 1879)
 * 1942 – Franz Boas, German-American anthropologist and linguist (b. 1858)
 * 1943 – Beatrix Potter, English children's book writer and illustrator (b. 1866)
 * 1944 – Harry Langdon, American actor, comedian, and vaudevillian (b. 1884)
 * 1950 – Frederick Freake, English polo player (b. 1876)
 * 1957 – Frank George Woollard, English engineer (b. 1883)
 * 1959 – Gilda Gray, Polish-American actress and dancer (b. 1901)
 * 1960 – Ninian Comper, Scottish-English architect (b. 1864)
 * 1962 – Ross McLarty, Australian politician, 17th Premier of Western Australia (b. 1891)
 * 1965 – Richard Dimbleby, English journalist (b. 1913)
 * 1968 – Raymond Gram Swing, American journalist (b. 1887)
 * 1969 – Enrique Peñaranda, 45th President of Bolivia (b. 1892)
 * 1971 – Godfried Bomans, Dutch journalist and author (b. 1913)
 * 1974 – Sterling North, American author and critic (b. 1906)
 * 1979 – Darryl F. Zanuck, American director and producer (b. 1902)
 * 1985 – D. Boon, American singer and musician (b. 1958)
 * 1986 – Mary Burchell, English author and activist (b. 1904)
 * 1986  – David Penhaligon, Cornish Liberal Politician (b. 1944), Member of Parliament (MP) for Truro (1974-1986)
 * 1987 – Luca Prodan, Italian-Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1953)
 * 1988 – Chico Mendes, Brazilian trade union leader and activist (b. 1944)
 * 1989 – Samuel Beckett, Irish author, poet, and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1906)
 * 1992 – Harry Bluestone, English violinist and composer (b. 1907)
 * 1992  – Frederick William Franz, American religious leader (b. 1893)
 * 1993 – Don DeFore, American actor (b. 1913)
 * 1995 – Butterfly McQueen, American actress and dancer (b. 1911)
 * 1995  – James Meade, English economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1907)
 * 1996 – Jack Hamm, American cartoonist and television host (b. 1916)
 * 1997 – Sebastian Arcos Bergnes, Cuban-American dentist and activist (b. 1931)
 * 2001 – Ovidiu Iacov, Romanian footballer (b. 1981)
 * 2001  – Walter Newton Read, American lawyer and second chairman of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission (b. 1918)
 * 2002 – Desmond Hoyte, Guyanese lawyer, politician and President of Guyana (b. 1929)
 * 2002  – Joe Strummer, English singer-songwriter (b. 1952)
 * 2004 – Doug Ault, American baseball player and manager (b. 1950)
 * 2006 – Elena Mukhina, Russian gymnast (b. 1960)
 * 2006  – Galina Ustvolskaya, Russian composer (b. 1919)
 * 2007 – Charles Court, Australian politician, 21st Premier of Western Australia (b. 1911)
 * 2007  – Adrian Cristobal, Filipino journalist and playwright (b. 1932)
 * 2009 – Luis Francisco Cuéllar, Colombian rancher and politician (b. 1940)
 * 2009  – Albert Scanlon, English footballer (b. 1935)
 * 2010 – Fred Foy, American soldier and announcer (b. 1921)
 * 2012 – Chuck Cherundolo, American football player and coach (b. 1916)
 * 2012  – Ryan Freel, American baseball player (b. 1976)
 * 2012  – Cliff Osmond, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1937)
 * 2012  – Lim Keng Yaik, Malaysian physician and politician (b. 1939)
 * 2013 – Diomedes Díaz, Colombian singer-songwriter (b. 1956)
 * 2013  – Hans Hækkerup, Danish lawyer and politician (b. 1945)
 * 2013  – Oscar Peer, Swiss author, playwright, and philologist (b. 1928)
 * 2014 – John Robert Beyster, American physicist and academic (b. 1924)
 * 2014  – Christine Cavanaugh, American actress (b. 1963)
 * 2014  – Joe Cocker, English singer-songwriter (b. 1944)
 * 2014  – Bernard Stone, American lawyer and politician (b. 1927)
 * 2015 – Peter Lundblad, Swedish singer-songwriter (b. 1950)
 * 2015  – Freda Meissner-Blau, Australian activist and politician (b. 1927)
 * 2016 – Chad Robinson, Australian rugby league player (b. 1980)
 * 2017 – Gonzalo Morales Sáurez, Costa Rican painter (b. 1945)
 * 2018 – Paddy Ashdown, British politician (b. 1941)
 * 2018  – Simcha Rotem, last survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (b. 1924)
 * 2018  – Herman Sikumbang, Indonesian guitarist (b. 1982); casualty during 2018 Sunda Strait tsunami
 * 2019 – Ram Dass, American spiritual teacher and author (b. 1931)

Holidays and observances

 * Dongzhi Festival
 * Armed Forces Day (Vietnam)
 * Christian feast day:
 * Anastasia of Sirmium (Orthodox Church)
 * Eimhin
 * Ernan, Son of Eogan
 * Frances Xavier Cabrini (outside US)
 * Hunger
 * O Rex
 * Henry Budd (Episcopal Church (USA))
 * Lottie Moon (Episcopal Church (USA))
 * December 22 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
 * Mother's Day (Indonesia)
 * National Mathematics Day (India)
 * Teachers' Day (Cuba)
 * Unity Day (Zimbabwe)

title: December 22


text:
David Deutsch

David Elieser Deutsch (born 18 May 1953) is a British physicist at the University of Oxford. He is a visiting professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation (CQC) in the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford. He pioneered the field of quantum computation by formulating a description for a quantum Turing machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer. He is a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Early life and education
Deutsch was born to a Jewish family in Haifa, Israel on 18 May 1953, the son of Oskar and Tikva Deutsch. In London, David attended Geneva House school in Cricklewood (his parents owned and ran the Alma restaurant on Cricklewood Broadway), followed by William Ellis School in Highgate before reading Natural Sciences at Clare College, Cambridge and taking Part III of the Mathematical Tripos. He went on to Wolfson College, Oxford for his doctorate in theoretical physics, about quantum field theory in curved space-time, supervised by Dennis Sciama and Philip Candelas.

Career and research
His work on quantum algorithms began with a 1985 paper, later expanded in 1992 along with Richard Jozsa, to produce the Deutsch–Jozsa algorithm, one of the first examples of a quantum algorithm that is exponentially faster than any possible deterministic classical algorithm. In his nomination for election as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2008, his contributions were described as:

"[having] laid the foundations of the quantum theory of computation, and has subsequently made or participated in many of the most important advances in the field, including the discovery of the first quantum algorithms, the theory of quantum logic gates and quantum computational networks, the first quantum error-correction scheme, and several fundamental quantum universality results. He has set the agenda for worldwide research efforts in this new, interdisciplinary field, made progress in understanding its philosophical implications (via a variant of the many-universes interpretation) and made it comprehensible to the general public, notably in his book The Fabric of Reality."

Since 2012, he has been working on constructor theory, an attempt at generalizing the quantum theory of computation to cover not just computation but all physical processes. Together with Chiara Marletto, he published a paper in December 2014 entitled Constructor theory of information, that conjectures that information can be expressed solely in terms of which transformations of physical systems are possible and which are impossible.

The Fabric of Reality
In his 1997 book The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch details his "Theory of Everything". It aims not at the reduction of everything to particle physics, but rather mutual support among multiversal, computational, epistemological, and evolutionary principles. His theory of everything is somewhat emergentist rather than reductive. There are four strands to his theory:

 * 1) Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, "the first and most important of the four strands."
 * 2) Karl Popper's epistemology, especially its anti-inductivism and requiring a realist (non-instrumental) interpretation of scientific theories, as well as its emphasis on taking seriously those bold conjectures that resist falsification.
 * 3) Alan Turing's theory of computation, especially as developed in Deutsch's Turing principle, in which the Universal Turing machine is replaced by Deutsch's universal quantum computer. ("The theory of computation is now the quantum theory of computation.")
 * 4) Richard Dawkins' refinement of Darwinian evolutionary theory and the modern evolutionary synthesis, especially the ideas of replicator and meme as they integrate with Popperian problem-solving (the epistemological strand).

Invariants
In a 2009 TED talk, Deutsch expounded a criterion for scientific explanation, which is to formulate invariants: "State an explanation [publicly, so that it can be dated and verified by others later] that remains invariant [in the face of apparent change, new information, or unexpected conditions]".
 * "A bad explanation is easy to vary."
 * "The search for hard-to-vary explanations is the origin of all progress"
 * "That is the most important fact about the physical world."

Invariance as a fundamental aspect of a scientific account of reality has long been part of philosophy of science: for example, Friedel Weinert's book The Scientist as Philosopher (2004) noted the presence of the theme in many writings from around 1900 onward, such as works by Henri Poincaré (1902), Ernst Cassirer (1920), Max Born (1949 and 1953), Paul Dirac (1958), Olivier Costa de Beauregard (1966), Eugene Wigner (1967), Lawrence Sklar (1974), Michael Friedman (1983), John D. Norton (1992), Nicholas Maxwell (1993), Alan Cook (1994), Alistair Cameron Crombie (1994), Margaret Morrison (1995), Richard Feynman (1997), Robert Nozick (2001), and Tim Maudlin (2002).

The Beginning of Infinity
Deutsch's second book, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World, was published on 31 March 2011. In this book, he views the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries as near the beginning of a potentially unending sequence of purposeful knowledge creation. He examines the nature of knowledge, memes, and how and why creativity evolved in humans.

Awards and honours
The Fabric of Reality was shortlisted for the Rhone-Poulenc science book award in 1998. Deutsch was awarded the Dirac Prize of the Institute of Physics in 1998, and the Edge of Computation Science Prize in 2005. In 2017, he received the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). Deutsch is linked to Paul Dirac through his doctoral advisor Dennis Sciama, whose doctoral advisor was Dirac. Deutsch was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2008. In 2018, he received the Micius Quantum Prize. In 2021, he was awarded the Isaac Newton Medal and Prize. On September 22, 2022, he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, sharing it with 3 others.

Personal life
Deutsch is a founding member of the parenting and educational method Taking Children Seriously.

Deutsch supported Brexit, with his advocacy quoted by the then government adviser, Dominic Cummings. Although Cummings quoted Deutsch in relation to his campaign for Brexit, Deutsch claimed that he "had absolutely no effect on the campaign". Regarding his mention by Michael Gove during a BBC Brexit debate, he said "No-one was more surprised than I." Regarding the debate, he also said:"'In Britain there is a clear path if you have a grievance, you can join a pressure-group, the pressure-group will pressure the government, or you can see your MP, and the MP will see the grievance building up, and so-on. Whereas, Europe is structured in such a way that it's very difficult to know whom to address your grievance to, or what they could do about it.'"

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: David Deutsch


text:
Volkssturm

The Volkssturm ("people's storm") was a levée en masse national militia established by Nazi Germany during the last months of World War II. It was set up by the Nazi Party on the orders of Adolf Hitler and established on 25 September 1944. It was staffed by conscripting males between the ages of 16 and 60 years, who were not already serving in some military unit. The Volkssturm comprised one of the final components of the total war promulgated by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, part of a Nazi endeavor to overcome their enemies' military strength through force of will. Volkssturm units fought unsuccessful battles against Allied forces at the end of the war. On several occasions, its members participated in atrocities, accompanied by German civilians and the Hitler Youth, which were overseen by members of the SS or Gaue leaders.

Origins and organisation
The Volkssturm drew inspiration from the Prussian Landsturm of 1813–1815, that fought in the liberation wars against Napoleon, mainly as guerrilla forces. Plans to form a Landsturm national militia in eastern Germany as a last resort to boost fighting strength were first proposed in 1944 by General Heinz Guderian, chief of the German General Staff. The army did not have enough men to resist the Soviet onslaught. So, additional categories of men were called into service, including those in non-essential jobs, those previously deemed unfit, over-age, or under-age, and those recovering from wounds. The Volkssturm had existed, on paper, since around 1925, but it was only after Hitler ordered Martin Bormann to recruit six million men for this militia that the group became a physical reality. While the regime formally established the Volkssturm on 25 September, it was not announced to the public until 16 October 1944. The official launch date was two days later, 18 October 1944 and was chosen by Heinrich Himmler to evoke parallels with the popular uprising which, according to popular legend, ended French rule over Germany and culminated in the Battle of Leipzig on the same date in 1813. Despite the appeal for this last-ditch effort, the intended strength of "six million" members was never attained.

Joseph Goebbels and other propagandists depicted the Volkssturm as an outburst of enthusiasm and the will to resist. Historian Daniel Blatman writes that the Volkssturm was portrayed as the "incarnation" of the greater Volksgemeinschaft, whereby "all differences in social status, origin, or age vanish and unite all people on the basis of race. It was the service framework for members of the local community, who had been raised together and lived side by side, and now bore arms together in order to defend the community." In some regards, the Volkssturm was the culmination of Goebbels' "total war" speech of February 1943 and its formation was "given a big build-up" in the November 1944 newsreel episode of Die Deutsche Wochenschau. Consistent messages of final victory from various Nazi media outlets accompanying the Volkssturm's creation provided a psychological rallying point for the civilian population. While it had some marginal effect on morale, it was undermined by the recruits' visible lack of uniforms and weaponry. Nazi themes of death, transcendence, and commemoration were given full play to encourage the fight. Many German civilians realised that this was a desperate attempt to turn the course of the war. Sardonic old men would remark, "We old monkeys are the Führer’s newest weapon" (in German this rhymes: "Wir alten Affen sind des Führers neue Waffen"). A popular joke about the Volkssturm went "Why is the Volkssturm Germany's most precious resource? Because its members have silver in their hair, gold in their mouths, and lead in their bones."

For these militia units to be effective, they needed not only strength in numbers, but also fanaticism. During the early stages of Volkssturm planning, it became apparent that units lacking morale would lack combat effectiveness. To generate fanaticism, Volkssturm units were placed under the direct command of local Nazi Party officials, the Gauleiter and Kreisleiter. The new Volkssturm was also to become a nationwide organisation, with Heinrich Himmler as Replacement Army commander, responsible for armaments and training. Though nominally under party control, Volkssturm units were placed under Heer command when engaged in action. At the Reich level, the SS and the Party Chancellery agreed to share responsibility between them. Himmler retained responsibility for military equipment and training while Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery, was charged with oversight of administration and political indoctrination. Aware that a "people's army" would not be able to withstand the onslaught of the modern army wielded by the Allies, Hitler issued the following order towards the end of 1944: "Experience in the East has shown that Volkssturm, emergency and reserve units have little fighting value when left to themselves, and can be quickly destroyed. The fighting value of these units, which are for the most part strong in numbers, but weak in the armaments required for modern battle, is immeasurably higher when they go into action with troops of the regular army in the field. I, therefore, order: where Volkssturm, emergency, and reserve units are available, together with regular units, in any battle sector, mixed battle-groups (brigades) will be formed under unified command, so as to give the Volkssturm, emergency, and reserve units stiffening and support."

With the Nazi Party in charge of organising the Volkssturm, each Gauleiter, or Nazi Party District Leader, was charged with the leadership, enrollment, and organisation of the Volkssturm in their district. The largest Volkssturm unit seems to have corresponded to the next smaller territorial subdivision of the Nazi Party organisation—the Kreis. The basic unit was a battalion of 642 men. Units were mostly composed of members of the Hitler Youth, invalids, the elderly, or men who had previously been considered unfit for military service. On 12 February 1945, the Nazis conscripted German women and girls into the auxiliaries of the Volkssturm. Correspondingly, girls as young as 14 years were trained in the use of small arms, Panzerfausts, machine guns, and hand grenades from December 1944 through May 1945.

Municipal organisation:
 * A Bataillon  (battalion) in every Kreis (roughly equivalent to a U.S. county; there were 920 Kreise in Greater Germany)
 * A Kompanie (company) in every Ortsgruppe (the "local chapter" of the Nazi Party).
 * A Zug (platoon) in every Zelle (literally a "cell" of Party members; roughly equivalent to a U.S. precinct)
 * A Gruppe (squad) in every Block (city block)

Each Gauleiter and Kreisleiter had a Volkssturm Chief of Staff.

From the militia's inception until the spring of 1945, Himmler and Bormann engaged in a power-struggle over the jurisdictional control over the Volkssturm regarding security and police powers in Germany and the occupied territories; a contest which Himmler and the SS more or less won on one level (police and security), but lost to Bormann on another (mobilising reserve forces). Historian David Yelton described the situation as two ranking officers at the helm of a sinking ship fighting over command.

Benito Mussolini suggested, through his son Vittorio, then general secretary of the Republican Fascist Party's German branch, that 30,000 Italians should be added to the Volkssturm in the defence of Germany. However, no evidence exists that this offer was implemented.

Uniforms and insignia
The Volkssturm "uniform" was only a black armband with the German words Deutscher Volkssturm Wehrmacht ("German People's Storm Armed Forces"). The German government tried to issue as many of its members as possible with military uniforms of all sorts, ranging from Feldgrau to camouflage types. An example of the Volkssturm 's piecemeal outfitting occurred in the Rhineland, where one unit was provided with "pre-war black SS uniforms, brown Organization Todt coats, blue Air Force auxiliary caps, and French steel helmets." Most members of the Volkssturm, especially elderly members, had no uniforms and were not supplied, so they generally wore either work uniforms (including railway workers, policemen, and firemen), Hitler Youth uniforms, old uniforms or their parts from the time of the First World War, or their civilian clothing and usually carried with them their own personal rucksacks, blankets, cooking-equipment, etc.

Ranks
The simple paramilitary insignia of the Volkssturm were as follows:

Training and impact
Typically, members of the Volkssturm received only very basic military training. It included a brief indoctrination and training on the use of basic weapons such as the Karabiner 98k rifle and Panzerfaust. Because of continuous fighting and weapon shortages, weapon training was often minimal. There was also a lack of instructors, meaning that weapons training was sometimes done by World War I veterans drafted into service themselves. Often Volkssturm members were only able to familiarise themselves with their weapons when in actual combat.

There was no standardisation of any kind and units were issued only what equipment was available. This was true of every form of equipment—Volkssturm members were required to bring their own uniforms and culinary equipment etc. This resulted in the units looking very ragged and, instead of boosting civilian morale, it often reminded people of Germany's desperate state. Armament was equally haphazard: though some Karabiner 98ks were on hand, members were also issued older Gewehr 98s, Steyr-Mannlicher M1895s, 19th-century Gewehr 71s, and Steyr-Mannlicher M1888s, as well as Dreyse M1907 pistols. In addition there was a plethora of Soviet, British, Belgian, French, Italian, and other weapons that had been captured by German forces during the war. The Germans had also developed cheap Volkssturm weapons, such as MP 3008 machine pistols and Volkssturmgewehr rifles. These were completely stamped and machine-pressed constructions (in the 1940s, industrial processes were much cruder than today, so a firearm needed great amounts of semi-artisanal work to be actually reliable). The Volkssturm troops were nominally supplied when and where possible by both the Wehrmacht and the SS. By the end of January 1945, the Volkssturm had only accumulated 40,500 rifles and 2,900 machine guns amid this mish-mash of foreign and outdated assemblage of weapons.

When units had completed their training and received armament, members took a customary oath to Hitler and were then dispatched into combat. Teenagers and middle-aged men were sent to separate training camps, some of whom received as little as ten to fourteen days of training before being sent to fight. Unlike most English-speaking countries, Germany had universal military service for all young men for several generations, so many of the older members would have had at least basic military training from when they served in the German Army and many would have been veterans of the First World War. Volkssturm units were supposed to be used only in their own districts, but many were sent directly to the front lines. Ultimately, it was their charge to confront the overwhelming power of the British, Canadian, Soviet, American, and French armies alongside Wehrmacht forces to either turn the tide of the war or set a shining example for future generations of Germans and expunge the defeat of 1918 by fighting to the last, dying before surrendering. It was an apocalyptic goal which some of those assigned to the Volkssturm took to heart. Unremittingly fanatical members of the Volkssturm refused to abandon the Nazi ethos unto the dying days of Nazi Germany, and in a number of instances took brutal "police actions" against German civilians deemed defeatists or cowards.

Losses were high among the Volkssturm – Battalion 25/235 for instance, started out with 400 men but fought on until there were only 10 men remaining. Fighting at Küstrin between 30 January to 29 March 1945, militia units made up mostly of the Volkssturm resisted for nearly two months. Losses were upwards of 60 percent for the Volkssturm at Kolberg, roughly 1,900 of them died at Breslau, and during the Battle of Königsberg, another 2,400 members of the Volkssturm were killed. At other times along the western front particularly, Volkssturm troops would cast their arms aside and disappear into the chaos.

Many units lost their enthusiasm for the fight when it became clear that the Allies had won, prompting them to lay down their weapons and surrender – they also feared being captured by Allied forces and tortured or executed as partisans. Duty to their communities also played a part in their capitulation, as did self-preservation.

Battle for Berlin
Their most extensive use was during the Battle of Berlin, where Volkssturm units fought in many parts of the city. This battle was particularly devastating to its formations; however, many members fought to the death out of fear of being captured by the Soviets. The Volkssturm had a strength of about 60,000 in the Berlin area, formed into 92 battalions, of which about 30 battalions of Volkssturm I (those with some weapons) were sent to forward positions, while those of Volkssturm II (those without weapons) remained in the inner city. One of the few substantive fighting units left to defend Berlin was the LVI Panzer Corps, which occupied the southeastern sector of the town, whereas the remaining parts of the city were being defended by what remained of the SS, the Volkssturm, and the Hitler Youth formations. Nonetheless, a force of over 2.5 million Soviet troops, equipped with 6,250 tanks and over 40,000 artillery pieces were assigned to capture the city, and the diminished remnants of the Wehrmacht were no match for them. Meanwhile, Hitler denounced every perceived "betrayal" to the inhabitants of the Führerbunker. Not eager to die what was thought to be a pointless death, many older members of the Volkssturm looked for places to hide from the approaching Soviet Army.

One notable and unusual Volkssturm unit in the Battle for Berlin was the 3/115 Siemensstadt Battalion. It comprised 770 men, mostly World War I veterans in their 50s who were reasonably fit factory workers, with experienced officers. Unlike most Volkssturm units it was quite well equipped and trained. It was formed into three rifle companies, a support company (with two infantry support guns, four infantry mortars, and heavy machine guns), and a heavy weapons company (with four Soviet M-20 howitzers and a French De Bange 220mm mortar). The battalion first engaged Soviet troops at Friedrichsfelde on 21 April and saw the heaviest fighting over the following two days. It held out until 2 May, by which time it was down to just 50 rifles and two light machine guns. The survivors fell back to join other Volkssturm units. 26 men from the battalion were awarded the Iron Cross. Allied bombing and Soviet artillery had reduced Berlin to rubble; meanwhile the final stand in Berlin dwindled to fighting against highly trained, battle-hardened Soviet troops on the brink of final victory, who viewed resistance fighters like the Volkssturm as terrorists in much the same way the Wehrmacht once had viewed potential partisans during Operation Barbarossa. Red Army soldiers called the Hitler Youth formations and members of the Volkssturm still fighting to the end in Berlin "totals" for being part of Germany's total mobilisation effort.

Role in atrocities
On several occasions, members of the Volkssturm participated in atrocities. During January 1945, thousands of prisoners were evacuated and force-marched from several smaller concentrations camps—which included Jesau, Seerappen, Schippenbeil, Gerdauen, and Helgenbeil—near Königsberg, many dying along the way. Upon reaching Palmnicken, some 2,500 to 3,000 prisoners of the 5,000 that originally began the journey were lodged in a factory. Mayor and local Nazi party chief, Kurt Friedrichs wanted the SS to send these prisoners on their way since the Red Army was not far away. When local Volkssturm leader Hans Feyerabend was ordered to transport the suffering prisoners out of the town, he refused to carry out the order and was heard exclaiming that he would not permit a massacre like the one at Katyn forest. Feyerabend even assigned Volkssturm guards to keep watch on the local Nazi party members, but this proved fruitless when Friedrich armed a group of Hitler Youth and likewise summoned the local SD elements, whose leaders then commanded the Volkssturm to help evacuate the prisoners. On 30 January 1945, after the Volkssturm left with Friedrich in charge, Feyerabend committed suicide; then between 30 January and 1 February the prisoners were murdered by the remaining assemblage of SS guards, Hitler Youth, and the local Volkssturm unit.

When prisoners fell sick with typhus in the Styria Gau during February–March 1945, SS men, Hitler Youth, and Volkssturm units systematically murdered them. Under the orders of Loeben-district Kreisleiter, Otto Christandl, Volkssturm units in nearby Graz and Eisenerz assisted the Gestapo and Ukrainian Waffen-SS troops in evacuating between 6,000 and 8,000 prisoners—being marched towards Mauthausen—from their region, many of whom were murdered during the journey when they collapsed from exhaustion.

Sometime in early April 1945 as Allied forces approached the Mittelwerk facilities—where V2 rockets were being produced—the slave labourers from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp were force-marched from the western Harz by a collection of guards drawn from the military, the Hitler Youth, and the Volkssturm. Approximately 40 kilometers north of Magdeburg in the village of Mieste, this motley assemblage of guards locked a thousand of these prisoners in a barn and burned them alive at the instruction of a local Nazi Party leader; this event came to be known as the Gardelegen massacre. At the town of Celle in Lower Saxony around the same time, members of the SS, SA, local police, Hitler Youth, and Volkssturm were aided by locals to "hunt down and shoot" prisoners who had fled into the local woodland after their transport train was bombed.

Interrogated members of the Volkssturm—when questioned as to where the regular forces had gone—revealed that German soldiers surrendered to the Americans and British instead of the Red Army for fear of reprisals related to the atrocities they had committed in the Soviet Union.

Final phase
While Iron Crosses were being handed out in places like Berlin, other cities and towns like Parchim and Mecklenburg witnessed old elites, acting as military commandants over the Hitler Youth and Volkssturm, asserting themselves and demanding that the defensive fighting stop so as to spare lives and property. Despite their efforts, the last four months of the war were an exercise in futility for the Volkssturm, and the Nazi leadership's insistence to continue the fight to the bitter end contributed to an additional 1.23 million (approximated) deaths, half of them German military personnel and the other half from the Volkssturm.

In many small towns, when leading members of the Volkssturm refused to fight on against the superior forces of the Allies—part of an attempt to circumvent the "total destruction" of their home regions—they were tried and "summarily hanged" by party activists. Thousands were killed like this in Franken during the spring of 1945.

Notable members

 * Otto Dix, German painter
 * Gerhart Drabsch, German writer, killed on the Eastern Front in 1945
 * Martin Heidegger, German philosopher
 * Otto Herzog, received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross
 * Hans Modrow, penultimate Prime Minister of East Germany
 * Ernst Tiburzy, received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.
 * Gustav Anton von Wietersheim, WWI veteran and WWII general dismissed for apparent failures early in the Battle of Stalingrad, who served in the Volkssturm as a private

In fiction

 * Gregor Dorfmeister, under the pseudonym of Manfred Gregor, in 1958 published the novel Die Brücke, based on his experiences in a Volkssturm unit. The novel was adapted to film the following year and to a made-for-television movie in 2008.
 * Volkssturm units composed of teenagers are depicted in battle scenes in the 2004 film Downfall.
 * Volkssturm units composed of teenagers are depicted in scenes in the sixth episode of the 2019 Das Erste series Charité at War, which streams on Netflix.
 * Volkssturm units are seen in battle scenes in the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit by Taika Waititi.
 * Volkssturm units composed of teenagers are depicted in battle scenes in the 2014 film Fury.

title: Volkssturm


text:
Director's cut

In public use, a director's cut is the director's preferred version of a film (or video game, television episode, music video, or commercial). It is generally considered a marketing term to represent the version of a film the director prefers, and is usually used as contrast to a theatrical release where the director did not have final cut privilege and did not agree with what was released. ("Cut" explicitly refers to the editing process.)

Most of the time, film directors do not have the "final cut" (final say on the version released to the public). Those with money invested in the film, such as the production companies, distributors, or studios, may make changes intended to make the film more profitable at the box office. In extreme cases that can sometimes mean a different ending, less ambiguity, or excluding scenes that would earn a more audience-restricting rating, but more often means that the film is simply shortened to provide more screenings per day.

With the rise of home video, the phrase became more generically used as a marketing term to communicate to consumers that this is the director's preferred edit of a film, and it implies the director was not happy with the version that was originally released. Sometimes there a big disagreements between the director's vision and the producer's vision, and the director's preferred edit is sought after by fans (for example Terry Gilliam's Brazil).

Not all films have separate "director's cuts", (often the director is happy with the theatrical release, even if they didn't have final cut privilege), and sometimes separate versions of films are released as "director's cuts" even if the director doesn't prefer them. Once such example is Ridley's Scott Alien, which had a "director's cut" released in 2003, even though the director said it was purely for "marketing purposes" and didn't represent his preferred vision for the film.

Sometimes alternate edits are released, which are not necessarily director's preferred cuts, but which showcase a different visions for the project for fans to enjoy. Examples include James Cameron's Avatar, which was released both a "Special Edition" and "Extended" cuts, and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, which were released on home video as "Extended Editions". These versions do not represent the director's preferred visions.

The term since expanded to include media such as video games, comic books and music albums, (the latter two of which don't actually have directors).

Original use of the phrase
Within the industry itself, a "director's cut" refers to a stage in the editing process, and is not usually what a director wants to release to the public, due to the fact it is unfinished. The editing process of a film is broken into stages: First is the assembly/rough cut, where all selected takes are put together in the order in which they should appear in the film. Next, the editor's cut is reduced from the rough cut; the editor may be guided by their own choices or following notes from the director or producers. Eventually is the final cut, which actually gets released or broadcast. In between the editor's cut and the final cut can come any number of fine cuts, including the director's cut. The director's cut may include unsatisfactory takes, a preliminary soundtrack, a lack of desired pick-up shots etc., which the director would not like to be shown but uses as a placeholder until satisfactory replacements can be inserted. This is still how the term is used within the film industry, as well as commercials, television, and music videos.

Inception
The trend of releasing alternate cuts of films for artistic reasons became prominent in the 1970s; in 1974, the "director's cut" of The Wild Bunch was shown theatrically in Los Angeles to sold-out audiences. The theatrical release of the film had cut 10 minutes to get an R rating, but this cut was hailed as superior and has now become the definitive one. Other early examples include George Lucas's first two films being re-released following the success of Star Wars, in cuts which more closely resembled his vision, or Peter Bogdanovich re-cutting The Last Picture Show several times. Charlie Chaplin also re-released all of his films in the 1970s, several of which were re-cut (Chaplin's re-release of The Gold Rush in the 1940s is almost certainly the earliest prominent example of a director's re-cut film being released to the public). A theatrical re-release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind used the phrase "Special Edition" to describe a cut which was closer to Spielberg's intent but had a compromised ending demanded by the studio.

As the home video industry rose in the early 1980s, video releases of director's cuts were sometimes created for the small but dedicated cult fan market. Los Angeles cable station Z Channel is also cited as significant in the popularization of alternate cuts. Early examples of films released in this manner include Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, where a longer cut was recalled from theatres but subsequently shown on cable and eventually released to home video; James Cameron's Aliens, where a video release restored 20 minutes the studio had insisted on cutting; Cameron also voluntarily made cuts to the theatrical version of The Abyss for pacing but restored them for a video release, and most famously, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, where an alternate workprint version was released to fan acclaim, ultimately resulting in the 1992 recut. Scott later recut the film once more, releasing a version dubbed "The Final Cut" in 2007. This was the final re-cut and the first in which Scott maintained creative control over the final product, leading to The Final Cut being considered the definitive version of the film.

Criticism
Once distributors discovered that consumers would buy alternate versions of films, it became more common for films to have alternative versions released. And the original public meaning of a director's preferred vision has become ignored, leading to so-called "director's cuts" of films where the director prefers the theatrically released version (or when the director had actual final cut privilege in the first place). Such versions are often marketing ploys, assembled by simply restoring deleted scenes, sometimes adding as much as a half-hour to the length of the film without regard to pacing and storytelling.

As a result, the "director's cut" is often considered a misnomer. Some directors deliberately try to avoid labelling alternate versions as such (eg. Peter Jackson and James Cameron; each using the phrases "Special Edition" or "Extended Edition" for alternate versions of their films).

Sometimes the term is used a marketing ploy. For example, Ridley Scott states on the director's commentary track of Alien that the original theatrical release was his "director's cut", and that the new version was released as a marketing ploy. Director Peter Bogdanovich, no stranger to director's cuts himself, cites Red River as an example where "MGM have a version of Howard Hawks's Red River that they're calling the Director's Cut and it is absolutely not the director's cut. It's a cut the director didn't want, an earlier cut that was junked. They assume because it was longer that it's a director's cut. Capra cut two reels off Lost Horizon because it didn't work and then someone tried to put it back. There are certainly mistakes and stupidities in reconstructing pictures."

Another way that released director's cuts can be compromised is when directors were never allowed to even shoot their vision, and thus when the film is re-cut, they must make do with the footage that exists. Examples of this include Terry Zwigoff's Bad Santa, Brian Helgeland's Payback, and most notably the Richard Donner re-cut of Superman II. Donner completed about 75 per cent of the shooting of the sequel during the shooting of the first one but was fired from the project. His director's cut of the film includes, among other things, screen test footage of stars Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder, footage used in the first film, and entire scenes that were shot by replacement director Richard Lester which Donner dislikes but were required for story purposes.

On the other side, some critics (such as Roger Ebert) have approved of the use of the label in unsuccessful films that had been tampered with by studio executives, such as Sergio Leone's original cut of Once Upon a Time in America, and the moderately successful theatrical version of Daredevil, which were altered by studio interference for their theatrical release. Other well-received director's cuts include Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (with Empire magazine stating: "The added 45 minutes in the Director’s Cut are like pieces missing from a beautiful but incomplete puzzle" ), or Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, where the restored 115-minute cut is closer to the director's intent than the theatrical 105-minute cut (the actual director's cut was 122 minutes; it was never completed to Peckinpah's satisfaction, but was used as a guide for the restoration that was done after his death).

In some instances, such as Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, Robert Wise's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, John Cassavetes's The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Blake Edwards's Darling Lili and Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Coda, changes made to a director's cut resulted in a very similar runtime or a shorter, more compact cut. This generally happens when a distributor insists that a film be completed to meet a release date, but sometimes it is the result of removing scenes that the distributor insisted on inserting, as opposed to restoring scenes they insisted on cutting.

Extended cuts and special editions
(See Changes in Star Wars re-releases and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: The 20th Anniversary)

Separate to director's cuts are alternate cuts released as "special editions" or "extended cuts". These versions are often put together for home video for fans, and should not be confused with 'director's cuts'. For example, despite releasing extended versions of his The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson told IGN in 2019 that “the theatrical versions are the definitive versions, I regard the extended cuts as being a novelty for the fans that really want to see the extra material.”

James Cameron has shared similar sentiments regarding the special editions of his films, "What I put into theaters is the Director's Cut. Nothing was cut that I didn't want cut. All the extra scenes we've added back in are just a bonus for the fans." Similar statements were made by Ridley Scott for the 2003 'director's cut' of Alien.

Such alternate versions sometimes include changes to the special effects in addition to different editing, such as George Lucas's Star Wars films, and Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Extended or special editions can also apply to films that have been extended for television or cut out to fill time slots and long advertisement breaks, against the explicit wishes of the director, such as the TV versions of Dune (1984), The Warriors (1979), Superman (1978) and the Harry Potter films.

Examples of alternate cuts
The Lord of the Rings film series directed by Peter Jackson saw an "Extended Edition" release for each of the three films The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003) featuring an additional 30 minutes, 47 minutes and 51 minutes respectively of new scenes, special effects and music alongside fan-club credits. These versions of the films were not Jackson's preferred edit, however, they were simply extended versions for fans to enjoy at home.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice directed by Zack Snyder had an "Ultimate Edition," which added back 31 minutes of footage cut for the theatrical release and received an R rating, released digitally on 28 June 2016, and on Blu-ray on 19 July 2016. The extended director's cut received more positive critical reviews than the theatrically released film.

The film Justice League which suffered a very troubled production, was begun by Snyder, who completed a pre-postproduction director's cut but had to step down before completing the project due to his daughter's death. Joss Whedon was hired by the films' distributor Warner Bros. Pictures to complete the film, which was however heavily re-shot, re-edited and released in 2017 with Snyder retaining the directorial credit, to negative reception from general audience, fans and critics alike and a box office failure. Following a global fan campaign to which the director and members of the cast and crew showed support, Snyder was allowed to return and complete the project the way he intended it and a 4-hour version of the film dubbed Zack Snyder's Justice League with some additionally shot scenes at the end was released on March 18, 2021, on HBO Max to much favorable reviews and acclaim. Snyder originally teased a 214-minute cut of the film that was supposed to be the theatrical version released in 2017 if he did not step down from the project. Snyder has also confirmed that his Netflix distributed sci-fi film Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023) and its sequel Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (2024) would receive R-rated director's cuts with its new titles Rebel Moon – Chapter One: Chalice of Blood, and the sequel Rebel Moon – Chapter Two: Curse of Forgiveness (both 2024). The PG-13 initial versions of those films having been critically panned.

The film Caligula exists in at least 10 different officially released versions, ranging from a sub-90-minute television edit version of TV-14 (later TV-MA) for cable television to an unrated full pornographic version exceeding 3.5 hours. This is believed to be the largest amount of distinct versions of a single film. Among major studio films, the record is believed to be held by Blade Runner; the magazine Video Watchdog counted no less than seven distinct versions in a 1993 issue, before director Ridley Scott later released a "Final Cut" in 2007 to acclaim from critics including Roger Ebert who included it on his great movies list, The release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut brings the supposed grand total to eight differing versions of Blade Runner.

Upon its release on DVD and Blu-ray in 2019, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald featured an extended cut with seven minutes of additional footage. This is the first time since Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that a Wizarding World film has had one.

An animated example of an extended cut without the approval of the director was 1983's Twice Upon a Time, which was extended to have more profanity (supervised by co-writer and producer Bill Couturié) as opposed to co-director John Korty's original.

The Coen Brothers' Blood Simple is one of few examples that demonstrate director's cuts are not necessarily longer.

Music videos
The music video for the 2006 Academy Award-nominated song "Listen", performed by Beyoncé, received a director's cut by Diane Martel. This version of the video was later included on Knowles' B'Day Anthology Video Album (2007). Linkin Park has a director's cut version for their music video "Faint" (directed by Mark Romanek) in which one of the band members spray paints the words "En Proceso" on a wall, as well as Hoobastank also having one for 2004's "The Reason" which omits the woman getting hit by the car. Britney Spears' music video for 2007's "Gimme More" was first released as a director's cut on iTunes, with the official video released 3 days later. Many other director's cut music videos contain sexual content that can't be shown on TV thus creating alternative scenes, such as Thirty Seconds to Mars's "Hurricane", and in some cases, alternative videos, such as in the case of Spears' 2008 video for "Womanizer".

Expanded usage in pop culture
As the trend became more widely recognized, the term director's cut became increasingly used as a colloquialism to refer to an expanded version of other things, including video games, music, and comic books. This confusing usage only served to further reduce the artistic value of a director's cut, and it is currently rarely used in those ways.

Video games
For video games, these expanded versions, also referred as "complete editions", will have additions to the gameplay or additional game modes and features outside the main portion of the game.

As is the case with certain high-profile Japanese-produced games, the game designers may take the liberty to revise their product for the overseas market with additional features during the localization process. These features are later added back to the native market in a re-release of a game in what is often referred as the international version of the game. This was the case with the overseas versions of Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid and Rogue Galaxy, which contained additional features (such as new difficulty settings for Metal Gear Solid), resulting in re-released versions of those respective games in Japan (Final Fantasy VII International, Metal Gear Solid: Integral and Rogue Galaxy: Director's Cut). In the case of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, the American versions were released first, followed by the Japanese versions and then the European versions, with each regional release offering new content not found in the previous one. All of the added content from the Japanese and European versions of those games were included in the expanded editions titled Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance and Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence.

They also, similar to movies, will occasionally include extra, uncensored or alternate versions of cutscenes, as was the case with Resident Evil: Code Veronica X. In markets with strict censorship, a later relaxing of those laws occasional will result in the game being rereleased with the "Special/Uncut Edition" tag added to differentiate between the originally released censored version and the current uncensored edition.

Several of the Pokémon games have also received director's cuts and have used the term "extension", though "remake" and "third version" are also often used by many fans. These include Pocket Monsters: Blue (Japan only), Pokémon Yellow (for Pokémon Red and Green/Blue), Pokémon Crystal (for Pokémon Gold and Silver), Pokémon Emerald (for Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire), Pokémon Platinum (for 'Pokémon Diamond and Pearl') and Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon.

For their PlayStation 5 "Director's Cut" releases of the PlayStation 4 games Ghost of Tsushima and Death Stranding both received expanded features on both games.

Music
"Director's cuts" in music are rarely released. A few exceptions include Guided by Voices' 1994 album Bee Thousand, which was re-released as a three disc vinyl LP director's cut in 2004, and Fall Out Boy's 2003 album Take This to Your Grave, which was re-released as a Director's cut in 2005 with two extra tracks.

In 2011 British singer Kate Bush released the album titled Director's Cut. It is made up of songs from her earlier albums The Sensual World and The Red Shoes which have been remixed and restructured, three of which were re-recorded completely.

title: Director's cut


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Digital video

Digital video is an electronic representation of moving visual images (video) in the form of encoded digital data. This is in contrast to analog video, which represents moving visual images in the form of analog signals. Digital video comprises a series of digital images displayed in rapid succession, usually at 24, 25, 30, or 60 frames per second. Digital video has many advantages such as easy copying, multicasting, sharing and storage.

Digital video was first introduced commercially in 1986 with the Sony D1 format, which recorded an uncompressed standard-definition component video signal in digital form. In addition to uncompressed formats, popular compressed digital video formats today include MPEG-2, H.264 and AV1. Modern interconnect standards used for playback of digital video include HDMI, DisplayPort, Digital Visual Interface (DVI) and serial digital interface (SDI).

Digital video can be copied and reproduced with no degradation in quality. In contrast, when analog sources are copied, they experience generation loss. Digital video can be stored on digital media such as Blu-ray Disc, on computer data storage, or streamed over the Internet to end users who watch content on a personal computer or mobile device screen or a digital smart TV. Today, digital video content such as TV shows and movies also includes a digital audio soundtrack.

Digital video cameras
The basis for digital video cameras is metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) image sensors. The first practical semiconductor image sensor was the charge-coupled device (CCD), invented in 1969 by Willard S. Boyle, who won a Nobel Prize for his work in physics. Following the commercialization of CCD sensors during the late 1970s to early 1980s, the entertainment industry slowly began transitioning to digital imaging and digital video from analog video over the next two decades. The CCD was followed by the CMOS active-pixel sensor (CMOS sensor), developed in the 1990s.

Major films shot on digital video overtook those shot on film in 2013. Since 2016 over 90% of major films were shot on digital video. , 92% of films are shot on digital. Only 24 major films released in 2018 were shot on 35mm. Today, cameras from companies like Sony, Panasonic, JVC and Canon offer a variety of choices for shooting high-definition video. At the high-end of the market, there has been an emergence of cameras aimed specifically at the digital cinema market. These cameras from Sony, Vision Research, Arri, Blackmagic Design, Panavision, Grass Valley and Red offer resolution and dynamic range that exceeds that of traditional video cameras, which are designed for the limited needs of broadcast television.

Digital video coding
In the 1970s, pulse-code modulation (PCM) induced the birth of digital video coding, demanding high bit rates of 45-140 Mbit/s for standard-definition (SD) content. By the 1980s, the discrete cosine transform (DCT) became the standard for digital video compression.

The first digital video coding standard was H.120, created by the (International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee) or CCITT (now ITU-T) in 1984. H.120 was not practical due to weak performance. H.120 was based on differential pulse-code modulation (DPCM), a compression algorithm that was inefficient for video coding. During the late 1980s, a number of companies began experimenting with DCT, a much more efficient form of compression for video coding. The CCITT received 14 proposals for DCT-based video compression formats, in contrast to a single proposal based on vector quantization (VQ) compression. The H.261 standard was developed based on DCT compression, becoming first practical video coding standard. Since H.261, DCT compression has been adopted by all the major video coding standards that followed.

MPEG-1, developed by the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG), followed in 1991, and it was designed to compress VHS-quality video. It was succeeded in 1994 by MPEG-2/H.262, which became the standard video format for DVD and SD digital television. It was followed by MPEG-4 in 1999, and then in 2003 it was followed by H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which has become the most widely used video coding standard.

The current-generation video coding format is HEVC (H.265), introduced in 2013. While AVC uses the integer DCT with 4x4 and 8x8 block sizes, HEVC uses integer DCT and DST transforms with varied block sizes between 4x4 and 32x32. HEVC is heavily patented, with the majority of patents belonging to Samsung Electronics, GE, NTT and JVC Kenwood. It is currently being challenged by the aiming-to-be-freely-licensed AV1 format. , AVC is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression and distribution of video content, used by 91% of video developers, followed by HEVC which is used by 43% of developers.

Digital video production
Starting in the late 1970s to the early 1980s, video production equipment that was digital in its internal workings was introduced. These included time base correctors (TBC) and digital video effects (DVE) units. They operated by taking a standard analog composite video input and digitizing it internally. This made it easier to either correct or enhance the video signal, as in the case of a TBC, or to manipulate and add effects to the video, in the case of a DVE unit. The digitized and processed video information was then converted back to standard analog video for output.

Later on in the 1970s, manufacturers of professional video broadcast equipment, such as Bosch (through their Fernseh division) and Ampex developed prototype digital videotape recorders (VTR) in their research and development labs. Bosch's machine used a modified 1-inch type B videotape transport and recorded an early form of CCIR 601 digital video. Ampex's prototype digital video recorder used a modified 2-inch quadruplex videotape VTR (an Ampex AVR-3) fitted with custom digital video electronics and a special octaplex 8-head headwheel (regular analog 2" quad machines only used 4 heads). Like standard 2" quad, the audio on the Ampex prototype digital machine, nicknamed Annie by its developers, still recorded the audio in analog as linear tracks on the tape. None of these machines from these manufacturers were ever marketed commercially.

Digital video was first introduced commercially in 1986 with the Sony D1 format, which recorded an uncompressed standard definition component video signal in digital form. Component video connections required 3 cables, but most television facilities were wired for composite NTSC or PAL video using one cable. Due to this incompatibility the cost of the recorder, D1 was used primarily by large television networks and other component-video capable video studios. In 1988, Sony and Ampex co-developed and released the D2 digital videocassette format, which recorded video digitally without compression in ITU-601 format, much like D1. In comparison, D2 had the major difference of encoding the video in composite form to the NTSC standard, thereby only requiring single-cable composite video connections to and from a D2 VCR. This made it a perfect fit for the majority of television facilities at the time. D2 was a successful format in the television broadcast industry throughout the late '80s and the '90s. D2 was also widely used in that era as the master tape format for mastering laserdiscs.

D1 & D2 would eventually be replaced by cheaper systems using video compression, most notably Sony's Digital Betacam, that were introduced into the network's television studios. Other examples of digital video formats utilizing compression were Ampex's DCT (the first to employ such when introduced in 1992), the industry-standard DV and MiniDV and its professional variations, Sony's DVCAM and Panasonic's DVCPRO, and Betacam SX, a lower-cost variant of Digital Betacam using MPEG-2 compression. One of the first digital video products to run on personal computers was PACo: The PICS Animation Compiler from The Company of Science & Art in Providence, RI. It was developed starting in 1990 and first shipped in May 1991. PACo could stream unlimited-length video with synchronized sound from a single file (with the .CAV file extension) on CD-ROM. Creation required a Mac, and playback was possible on Macs, PCs, and Sun SPARCstations.

QuickTime, Apple Computer's multimedia framework, was released in June 1991. Audio Video Interleave from Microsoft followed in 1992. Initial consumer-level content creation tools were crude, requiring an analog video source to be digitized to a computer-readable format. While low-quality at first, consumer digital video increased rapidly in quality, first with the introduction of playback standards such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 (adopted for use in television transmission and DVD media), and the introduction of the DV tape format allowing recordings in the format to be transferred directly to digital video files using a FireWire port on an editing computer. This simplified the process, allowing non-linear editing systems (NLE) to be deployed cheaply and widely on desktop computers with no external playback or recording equipment needed.

The widespread adoption of digital video and accompanying compression formats has reduced the bandwidth needed for a high-definition video signal (with HDV and AVCHD, as well as several professional formats such as XDCAM, all using less bandwidth than a standard definition analog signal). These savings have increased the number of channels available on cable television and direct broadcast satellite systems, created opportunities for spectrum reallocation of terrestrial television broadcast frequencies, and made tapeless camcorders based on flash memory possible, among other innovations and efficiencies.

Digital video and culture
Culturally, digital video has allowed video and film to become widely available and popular, beneficial to entertainment, education, and research. Digital video is increasingly common in schools, with students and teachers taking an interest in learning how to use it in relevant ways. Digital video also has healthcare applications, allowing doctors to track infant heart rates and oxygen levels.

In addition, the switch from analog to digital video impacted media in various ways, such as in how businesses use cameras for surveillance. Closed circuit television (CCTV) switched to using digital video recorders (DVR), presenting the issue of how to store recordings for evidence collection. Today, digital video is able to be compressed in order to save storage space.

Digital television
Digital television (DTV) is the production and transmission of digital video from networks to consumers. This technique uses digital encoding instead of analog signals used prior to the 1950s. As compared to analog methods, DTV is faster and provides more capabilities and options for data to be transmitted and shared.

Digital television's roots are tied to the availability of inexpensive, high-performance computers. It was not until the 1990s that digital TV became a real possibility. Digital television was previously not practically feasible due to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of uncompressed video, requiring around 200Mbit/s for a standard-definition television (SDTV) signal, and over 1Gbit/s for high-definition television (HDTV).

Overview
Digital video comprises a series of digital images displayed in rapid succession. In the context of video, these images are called frames. The rate at which frames are displayed is known as the frame rate and is measured in frames per second. Every frame is a digital image and so comprises a formation of pixels. The color of a pixel is represented by a fixed number of bits of that color where the information of the color is stored within the image. For example, 8-bit captures 256 levels per channel, and 10-bit captures 1,024 levels per channel.  The more bits, the more subtle variations of colors can be reproduced. This is called the color depth, or bit depth, of the video.

Interlacing
In interlaced video each frame is composed of two halves of an image. The first half contains only the odd-numbered lines of a full frame. The second half contains only the even-numbered lines. These halves are referred to individually as fields. Two consecutive fields compose a full frame. If an interlaced video has a frame rate of 30 frames per second the field rate is 60 fields per second, though both part of interlaced video, frames per second and fields per second are separate numbers.

Bit rate and BPP
By definition, bit rate is a measurement of the rate of information content from the digital video stream. In the case of uncompressed video, bit rate corresponds directly to the quality of the video because bit rate is proportional to every property that affects the video quality. Bit rate is an important property when transmitting video because the transmission link must be capable of supporting that bit rate. Bit rate is also important when dealing with the storage of video because, as shown above, the video size is proportional to the bit rate and the duration. Video compression is used to greatly reduce the bit rate while having little effect on quality.

Bits per pixel (BPP) is a measure of the efficiency of compression. A true-color video with no compression at all may have a BPP of 24 bits/pixel. Chroma subsampling can reduce the BPP to 16 or 12 bits/pixel. Applying JPEG compression on every frame can reduce the BPP to 8 or even 1 bits/pixel. Applying video compression algorithms like MPEG1, MPEG2 or MPEG4 allows for fractional BPP values to exist.

Constant bit rate versus variable bit rate
BPP represents the average bits per pixel. There are compression algorithms that keep the BPP almost constant throughout the entire duration of the video. In this case, we also get video output with a constant bitrate (CBR). This CBR video is suitable for real-time, non-buffered, fixed bandwidth video streaming (e.g. in videoconferencing). Since not all frames can be compressed at the same level, because quality is more severely impacted for scenes of high complexity, some algorithms try to constantly adjust the BPP. They keep the BPP high while compressing complex scenes and low for less demanding scenes. This way, it provides the best quality at the smallest average bit rate (and the smallest file size, accordingly). This method produces a variable bitrate because it tracks the variations of the BPP.

Technical overview
Standard film stocks typically record at 24 frames per second. For video, there are two frame rate standards: NTSC, at 30/1.001 (about 29.97) frames per second (about 59.94 fields per second), and PAL, 25 frames per second (50 fields per second). Digital video cameras come in two different image capture formats: interlaced and progressive scan. Interlaced cameras record the image in alternating sets of lines: the odd-numbered lines are scanned, and then the even-numbered lines are scanned, then the odd-numbered lines are scanned again, and so on.

One set of odd or even lines is referred to as a field, and a consecutive pairing of two fields of opposite parity is called a frame. Progressive scan cameras record all lines in each frame as a single unit. Thus, interlaced video captures the scene motion twice as often as progressive video does for the same frame rate. Progressive scan generally produces a slightly sharper image, however, motion may not be as smooth as interlaced video.

Digital video can be copied with no generation loss; which degrades quality in analog systems. However, a change in parameters like frame size, or a change of the digital format can decrease the quality of the video due to image scaling and transcoding losses. Digital video can be manipulated and edited on non-linear editing systems.

Digital video has a significantly lower cost than 35 mm film. In comparison to the high cost of film stock, the digital media used for digital video recording, such as flash memory or hard disk drive is very inexpensive. Digital video also allows footage to be viewed on location without the expensive and time-consuming chemical processing required by film. Network transfer of digital video makes physical deliveries of tapes and film reels unnecessary. Digital television (including higher quality HDTV) was introduced in most developed countries in early 2000s. Today, digital video is used in modern mobile phones and video conferencing systems. Digital video is used for Internet distribution of media, including streaming video and peer-to-peer movie distribution.

Many types of video compression exist for serving digital video over the internet and on optical disks. The file sizes of digital video used for professional editing are generally not practical for these purposes, and the video requires further compression with codecs to be used for recreational purposes.

, the highest image resolution demonstrated for digital video generation is 132.7 megapixels (15360 x 8640 pixels). The highest speed is attained in industrial and scientific high-speed cameras that are capable of filming 1024x1024 video at up to 1 million frames per second for brief periods of recording.

Technical properties
Live digital video consumes bandwidth. Recorded digital video consumes data storage. The amount of bandwidth or storage required is determined by the frame size, color depth and frame rate. Each pixel consumes a number of bits determined by the color depth. The data required to represent a frame of data is determined by multiplying by the number of pixels in the image. The bandwidth is determined by multiplying the storage requirement for a frame by the frame rate. The overall storage requirements for a program can then be determined by multiplying bandwidth by the duration of the program.

These calculations are accurate for uncompressed video, but due to the relatively high bit rate of uncompressed video, video compression is extensively used. In the case of compressed video, each frame requires only a small percentage of the original bits. This reduces the data or bandwidth consumption by a factor of 5 to 12 times when using lossless compression, but more commonly, lossy compression is used due to its reduction of data consumption by factors of 20 to 200. Note that it is not necessary that all frames are equally compressed by the same percentage. Instead, consider the average factor of compression for all the frames taken together.

Interfaces and cables
Purpose-built digital video interfaces
 * Digital component video
 * Digital Visual Interface (DVI)
 * DisplayPort
 * HDBaseT
 * High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI)
 * Unified Display Interface

General-purpose interfaces use to carry digital video
 * FireWire (IEEE 1394)
 * Universal Serial Bus (USB)

The following interface has been designed for carrying MPEG-Transport compressed video:
 * DVB-ASI

Compressed video is also carried using UDP-IP over Ethernet. Two approaches exist for this:
 * Using RTP as a wrapper for video packets as with SMPTE 2022
 * 1–7 MPEG Transport Packets are placed directly in the UDP packet

Other methods of carrying video over IP
 * Network Device Interface
 * SMPTE 2110

Encoding

 * CCIR 601 used for broadcast stations
 * VC-2 also known as Dirac Pro
 * MPEG-4 good for online distribution of large videos and video recorded to flash memory
 * MPEG-2 used for DVDs, Super-VCDs, and many broadcast television formats
 * MPEG-1 used for video CDs
 * H.261
 * H.263
 * H.264 also known as MPEG-4 Part 10, or as AVC, used for Blu-ray Discs and some broadcast television formats
 * H.265 also known as MPEG-H Part 2, or as HEVC
 * MOV used for QuickTime framework
 * Theora used for video on Wikipedia

Tapes

 * Betacam SX, MPEG IMX, Digital Betacam, or DigiBeta — professional video formats by Sony, based on original Betamax technology
 * D-VHS — MPEG-2 format data recorded on a tape similar to S-VHSVideo_tape_B-Format_(6498660779).jpg
 * D1, D2, D3, D5, D7, D9 (also known as Digital-S) — various SMPTE professional digital video standards
 * Digital8 — DV-format data recorded on Hi8-compatible cassettes; largely a consumer format
 * DV, MiniDV — used in most of digital videocassette consumer camcorders; designed for high quality and easy editing; can also record high-definition data (HDV) in MPEG-2 format
 * DVCAM, DVCPRO — used in professional broadcast operations; similar to DV but generally considered more robust; though DV-compatible, these formats have better audio handling.
 * DVCPRO50 and DVCPRO HD support higher bandwidths as compared to Panasonic's DVCPRO.
 * HDCAM was introduced by Sony as a high-definition alternative to DigiBeta.
 * MicroMV — MPEG-2-format data recorded on a very small, matchbook-sized cassette; obsolete
 * ProHD — name used by JVC for its MPEG-2-based professional camcorders

Discs

 * Blu-ray Disc
 * DVD
 * VCD

title: Digital video