Information for MPEG

Short for Moving Picture Experts Group, and pronounced m-peg, is a working group of the ISO

The major MPEG standards include the following;

MPEG-1: The most common implementations of the MPEG-1 
standard provide a video resolution of 352-by-240 at
30 frames per second (fps). This produces video quality
slightly below the quality of conventional VCR videos.

MPEG-2: Offers resolutions of 720x480 and 1280x720 at 
60 fps, with full CD-quality audio. This is sufficient 
for all the major TV standards, including NTSC, and even
 HDTV. MPEG-2 is used by DVD-ROMs. MPEG-2 can compress a 2 
hour video into a few gigabytes. While decompressing an MPEG-2
 data stream requires only modest computing power, encoding 
video in MPEG-2 format requires significantly more processing
 power.

MPEG-3: Was designed for HDTV but was abandoned in place
of using MPEG-2 for HDTV.

MPEG-4: A graphics and video compression algorithm standard
that is based on MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 and Apple QuickTime 
technology. Wavelet-based MPEG-4 files are smaller than 
JPEG or QuickTime files, so they are designed to transmit 
video and images over a narrower bandwidth and can mix video
with text, graphics and 2-D and 3-D animation layers. MPEG-4 
was standardized in October 1998 in the ISO/IEC document 14496. 

MPEG-7: Formally called the Multimedia Content Description 
Interface, MPEG-7 provides a tool set for completely describing
multimedia content. MPEG-7 is designed to be generic and not 
targeted to a specific application.

MPEG-21: Includes a Rights Expression Language (REL) and a 
Rights Data Dictionary. Unlike other MPEG standards that 
describe compression coding methods, MPEG-21 describes a 
standard that defines the description of content and also 
processes for accessing, searching, storing and protecting 
the copyrights of content.