MPEG Compression Standards: Video and Audio Formats

• Designed for between 1.5 and 15 Mbit/sec.
• Standard on which Digital Television set-top boxes and DVD compression is based. It is based on MPEG-1, but designed for the compression and transmission of digital broadcast television.
• The most significant enhancement from MPEG-1 is its ability to efficiently compress interlaced video.

• Standard for multimedia and Web compression.
• MPEG-4 is based on object-based compression, similar in nature to the Virtual Reality Modeling Language.
• Individual objects within a scene are tracked separately and compressed together to create an MPEG4 file.
• This results in very efficient compression that is very scalable, from low bit rates to very high.
• It also allows developers to control objects independently in a scene, and therefore introduce interactivity.

MPEG-7, the Multimedia Content Description Interface Standard, is the standard for rich descriptions of multimedia content, enabling highly sophisticated management, search, and filtering of that content.

• The main tools used to implement MPEG-7 descriptions are the Description Definition Language (DDL), Description Schemes (DSs), and Descriptors (Ds).
• MPEG-7 will address both retrieval from digital archives (pull applications) as well as filtering of streamed audiovisual broadcasts on the Internet.

MPEG-21 will attempt to describe the elements needed to build an infrastructure for the delivery and consumption of multimedia content, and how they will relate to each other.

• The Digital Items can be considered the “what” of the Multimedia Framework (e.g., a video collection, a music album) and the Users can be considered the “who” of the Multimedia Framework.
• MPEG-21 identifies and defines the mechanisms and elements needed to support the multimedia delivery chain.