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Desktop Video AGOCG Report

MPEG

The Moving Pictures Experts Group meets under the auspices of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) to generate standards for digital video and audio compression. In particular, they define a compressed bit stream which implicitly defines a decompressor. However, the compression algorithms are the responsibility of the individual manufacturers and it is here that proprietary advantage is obtained within the scope of a publicly available international standard. MPEG meets approximately four times a year for about a week each time.

The MPEG group usually meet at the same time as the JPEG, JBIG and MHEG groups. However, they are different sets of people with few or no common individual members and they have different charters and requirements. JPEG is for still image compression, JBIG for binary image compression (like faxes) and MHEG is for multimedia data standards (such as integrating stills, video, audio, text, etc.)

MPEG phase 1 has been devised and is in three parts: video, audio and systems, where the last part provides for the integration of the audio and video streams with the proper time stamping to allow synchronisation of the two. Phase 2 will define a bit stream for video and audio coded at around 3 to 10 Mbit/s. The MPEG 1 standard is available as ISO CD 11172.

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