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MP3 - MPEG?

© Ewan Arnolda

MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) is a digital music and video compression format. Which are widely available on the World Wide Web. MPEG operates under the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The MPEG standards are an evolving series. Each standard is designed for different purpose. The MP3 format is derived from the MPEG-1 audio layer-3 standard. MPEG files are noticeable with its suffix .mpg and MP3 with its own suffix .mp3.

To use MPEG video files a personal computer with sufficient processor speed, memory and hard drive space to handle and play MPEG files. MPEG files are non-streaming files, which means you have to wait until the whole files in downloaded before playing the file. To play MPEG files, like MP3 files a MPEG player is required. There are many free and paid players available on the Net. Even many of the MP players can play .mpg files; check player specifications to which file formats can be played before purchasing or downloading the player.

MPEG Standards

The MPEG standards developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group are evolving standards for video and music compression. As mentioned before each standard was designed for different purposes.

MPEG-1
This standard was designed for coding progressive video, at a transmission rate of about 1.5 million bits per second and designed specially for Video-CD and CD-i media. MPEG-1 audio layer-3 is where the MP3 format evolved.

MPEG-2
To code interlaced images at transmission rates above 4 million bits per second, the MPEG-2 standard was designed. Digital TV broadcast and digital MPEG-2 is used for digital TV broadcast and digital versatile disk. An MPEG-2 player can handle MPEG-1 data as well.

MPEG-3
MPEG-3 was intended to be merged with MPEG-2 for use with High Definition TV (HDTV). When it became apparent that the MPEG-2 standard met the HDTV requirements.

MPEG-4
MPEG-4 is the final stages of development and release of the MPEG standards. This standard addresses speech and video synthesis, fractal geometry, computer visualization, and an artificial intelligence (AI) approach to reconstructing images.

“MPEG-1 and -2 define techniques for compressing digital video by factors varying from 25:1 to 50:1. The compression is achieved using five different compression techniques: The use of a frequency-based transform called Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Quantization, a technique for losing selective information (sometimes known as lossy compression) that can be acceptably lost from visual information. Huffman coding, a technique of lossless compression that uses code tables based on statistics about the encoded data.