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What is MPEG?
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MPEG is an acronym for Moving Picture Experts Group, which commonly refers to the international standard for digital video and audio compression. The official name of the MPEG-1 standard is: “Coding of Moving Pictures and Associated Audio for Digital Storage Media at up to about 1.5 Megabits per second.” It is sometimes referred to by its ISO/IEC project number, 11172 parts 1 through 5. However, this video standard is usually just called “MPEG”.

Just as Norton Utilities is a collection of tools for maintaining computer hard drives (and more), MPEG is a collection of tools for compressing audio and video. An important note about MPEG is that it does not specify how to perform compression. It does, however, describe a set of minimum requirements, which the MPEG decoder must live up to. (An MPEG decoder is the device, which plays back the compressed audio and video.) In particular, it defines a fictitious MPEG decoder, that incorporates the minimum requirements which determine whether something is MPEG or not.

There has been a lot of confusion in the media about the differences between MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. Contrary to what many people think, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 are not competitors to one another, and MPEG-2 is not an improved version of MPEG-1. MPEG-1 was in fact designed specifically for delivering video from a single speed CD-ROM drive.

 *(PXR4 Recording format-16 bit MPEG 1 Audio Layer2 compressed, 32kHz)

MPEG-2 is a completely different standard from MPEG-1, and is designed for different purposes. MPEG-2 is specifically targeted at digital transmission or broadcast of video signals, and supports a much wider range of resolutions and bitrates than the MPEG-1 standard. MPEG-2 has been chosen as the standard on which HDTV systems will be based.