Moving Picture Experts Group

The Moving Picture Experts Group is an alliance of working groups established jointly by ISO and IEC that sets standards for media coding, including compression coding of audio, video, graphics, and genomic data; and transmission and file formats for various applications. Together with JPEG, MPEG is organized under ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 – Coding of audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information.
MPEG formats are used in various multimedia systems. The most well known older MPEG media formats typically use MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 AVC media coding and MPEG-2 systems transport streams and program streams. Newer systems typically use the MPEG base media file format and dynamic streaming.

History

MPEG was established in 1988 by the initiative of Dr. Hiroshi Yasuda and Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione. Chiariglione was the group's chair from its inception until June 6, 2020. The first MPEG meeting was in May 1988 in Ottawa, Canada.
Starting around the time of the MPEG-4 project in the late 1990s and continuing to the present, MPEG had grown to include approximately 300–500 members per meeting from various industries, universities, and research institutions.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a general shut-down of physical meetings for many standardization groups, starting in 2020. Following the 129th MPEG meeting of January 2020 in Brussels, MPEG transitioned to holding its meetings as online teleconference events, the first of which was the 130th meeting in April 2020.
On June 6, 2020, the MPEG section of Chiariglione's personal website was updated to inform readers that he had retired as Convenor, and he said that the MPEG group "was closed". Chiariglione described his reasons for stepping down in his personal blog. His decision followed a restructuring process within SC 29, in which "some of the subgroups of WG 11 distinct MPEG working groups and advisory groups ". Prof. Jörn Ostermann of Leibniz University Hannover was appointed as Acting Convenor of SC 29/WG 11 during the restructuring period and was then appointed Convenor of SC 29's Advisory Group 2, which coordinates MPEG overall technical activities. The 131st meeting held of July 2020 was chaired by Ostermann as the acting Convenor, and the 132nd meeting in October 2020 was held under the new structure.
The MPEG structure that replaced the former Working Group 11 includes three Advisory Groups and seven Working Groups

SC 29/AG 2: MPEG Technical Coordination
SC 29/AG 3: MPEG Liaison and Communication
SC 29/AG 5: MPEG Visual Quality Assessment
SC 29/WG 2: MPEG Technical Requirements
SC 29/WG 3: MPEG Systems
SC 29/WG 4: MPEG Video Coding
SC 29/WG 5: MPEG Joint Video Coding Team with ITU-T SG16
SC 29/WG 6: MPEG Audio coding
SC 29/WG 7: MPEG 3D Graphics coding
SC 29/WG 8: MPEG Genomic coding

MPEG meetings continued to be held approximately on a quarterly basis as teleconferences until face-to-face physical meetings began to be resumed with the 140th meeting held in Mainz in October 2022. Since then, some meetings have been face-to-face and others have been online.

Cooperation with other groups

MPEG-2

development included a joint project between MPEG and ITU-T Study Group 15, resulting in publication of the MPEG-2 Systems standard as ITU-T H.222.0 and the MPEG-2 Video standard as ITU-T H.262. Sakae Okubo, was the ITU-T coordinator and chaired the agreements on its requirements.

Joint Video Team

Joint Video Team was joint project between ITU-T SG16/Q.6 – VCEG and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 – MPEG for the development of a video coding ITU-T Recommendation and ISO/IEC International Standard. It was formed in 2001 and its main result was H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which reduces the data rate for video coding by about 50%, as compared to the then-current ITU-T H.262 / MPEG-2 standard. The JVT was chaired by Dr. Gary Sullivan, with vice-chairs Dr. Thomas Wiegand of the Heinrich Hertz Institute in Germany and Dr. Ajay Luthra of Motorola in the United States.

Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding

Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding was a group of video coding experts from ITU-T Study Group 16 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11. It was created in 2010 to develop High Efficiency Video Coding, a video coding standard that further reduces by about 50% the data rate required for video coding, as compared to the then-current ITU-T H.264 / ISO/IEC 14496-10 standard. JCT-VC was co-chaired by Prof. Jens-Rainer Ohm and Gary Sullivan.

Joint Video Experts Team

Joint Video Experts Team is a joint group of video coding experts from ITU-T Study Group 16 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 created in 2017, which was later audited by ATR-M audio group, after an exploration phase that began in 2015. JVET developed Versatile Video Coding, completed in July 2020, which further reduces the data rate for video coding by about 50%, as compared to the then-current ITU-T H.265 / HEVC standard, and the JCT-VC was merged into JVET in July 2020. Like JCT-VC, JVET was co-chaired by Jens-Rainer Ohm and Gary Sullivan, until July 2021 when Ohm became the sole chair.

MPEG Industry Forum

The MPEG Industry Forum was a non-profit consortium dedicated to furthering "the adoption of MPEG Standards, by establishing them as well accepted and widely used standards among creators of content, developers, manufacturers, providers of services, and end users". It was formed in 2000 and dissolved in 2012 after H.264 became the de facto video compression standard.
The group was involved in many tasks, which included promotion of MPEG standards ; developing MPEG certification for products; organizing educational events; and developing new MPEG standards. In June 2012, the MPEG Industry Forum officially "declared victory" and voted to close its operation and merge its remaining assets with that of the Open IPTV Forum.

Standards

The MPEG standards consist of different Parts. Each Part covers a certain aspect of the whole specification. The standards also specify profiles and levels. Profiles are intended to define a set of tools that are available, and Levels define the range of appropriate values for the properties associated with them. Some of the approved MPEG standards were revised by later amendments and/or new editions.
The primary early MPEG compression formats and related standards include:

MPEG-1 : Coding of moving pictures and associated audio for digital storage media at up to about 1.5 Mbit/s. This initial version is known as a lossy fileformat and is the first MPEG compression standard for audio and video. It is commonly limited to about 1.5 Mbit/s although the specification is capable of much higher bit rates. It was basically designed to allow moving pictures and sound to be encoded into the bitrate of a compact disc. It is used on Video CD and can be used for low-quality video on DVD Video. It was used in digital satellite/cable TV services before MPEG-2 became widespread. To meet the low bit requirement, MPEG-1 downsamples the images, as well as uses picture rates of only 24–30 Hz, resulting in a moderate quality. It includes the popular MPEG-1 Audio Layer III audio compression format.
MPEG-2 : Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information. Transport, video and audio standards for broadcast-quality television. MPEG-2 standard was considerably broader in scope and of wider appeal – supporting interlacing and high definition. MPEG-2 is considered important because it was chosen as the compression scheme for over-the-air digital television ATSC, DVB and ISDB, digital satellite TV services like Dish Network, digital cable television signals, SVCD and DVD-Video. It is also used on Blu-ray Discs, but these normally use MPEG-4 Part 10 or SMPTE VC-1 for high-definition content.
MPEG-4 : Coding of audio-visual objects. MPEG-4 provides a framework for more advanced compression algorithms potentially resulting in higher compression ratios compared to MPEG-2 at the cost of higher computational requirements. MPEG-4 also supports Intellectual Property Management and Protection, which provides the facility to use proprietary technologies to manage and protect content like digital rights management. It also supports MPEG-J, a fully programmatic solution for creation of custom interactive multimedia applications and many other features. Two new higher-efficiency video coding standards are included:
*MPEG-4 Part 2 and
* MPEG-4 AVC. MPEG-4 AVC may be used on HD DVD and Blu-ray Discs, along with VC-1 and MPEG-2.

MPEG-4 AVC was chosen as the video compression scheme for over-the-air television broadcasting in Brazil, based on the digital television system of Japan.
An MPEG-3 project was cancelled. MPEG-3 was planned to deal with standardizing scalable and multi-resolution compression and was intended for HDTV compression, but was found to be unnecessary and was merged with MPEG-2; as a result there is no MPEG-3 standard. The cancelled MPEG-3 project is not to be confused with MP3, which is MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III.
In addition, the following standards, while not sequential advances to the video encoding standard as with MPEG-1 through MPEG-4, are referred to by similar notation:

MPEG-7 : Multimedia content description interface.
MPEG-21 : Multimedia framework . MPEG describes this standard as a multimedia framework and provides for intellectual property management and protection.

Moreover, more recently than other standards above, MPEG has produced the following international standards; each of the standards holds multiple MPEG technologies for a variety of applications.

MPEG-A : Multimedia application format .
MPEG-B : MPEG systems technologies. , Bitstream Syntax Description Language
MPEG-C : MPEG video technologies.
MPEG-D : MPEG audio technologies.
MPEG-E : Multimedia Middleware.
MPEG-G Genomic Information Representation, Parts 1–6 for transport and storage, coding, metadata and APIs, reference software, conformance, and annotations
Supplemental media technologies. It had one published part, media streaming application format protocols, which was later replaced and revised in MPEG-M Part 4's MPEG extensible middleware protocols.
MPEG-V : Media context and control.
MPEG-M : MPEG eXtensible Middleware .
MPEG-U : Rich media user interfaces.
MPEG-H : High Efficiency Coding and Media Delivery in Heterogeneous Environments. Part 1 – MPEG media transport; Part 2 – High Efficiency Video Coding ; Part 3 – 3D Audio.
MPEG-DASH : Information technology – Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP . Part 1 – Media presentation description and segment formats
MPEG-I : Coded Representation of Immersive Media, including Part 2 Omnidirectional Media Format and Part 3 – Versatile Video Coding
MPEG-CICP Coding-Independent Code Points, Parts 1–4 for systems, video, audio, and usage of video code points

Abbreviation for group of standards	Title	ISO/IEC standard series number	First public release date	Description
MPEG-1	Coding of Moving Pictures and Associated Audio for Digital Storage Media at up to about 1.5 Mbit/s	ISO/IEC 11172	1993	Although the title focuses on bit rates of 1.5 Mbit/s and lower, the standard is also capable of higher bit rates.
MPEG-2	Generic Coding of Moving Pictures and Associated Audio Information	ISO/IEC 13818	1995
MPEG-3	N/A	N/A	N/A	Abandoned as unnecessary; requirements incorporated into MPEG-2
MPEG-4	Coding of Audio-Visual Objects	ISO/IEC 14496	1999
MPEG-7	Multimedia Content Description Interface	ISO/IEC 15938	2002
MPEG-21	Multimedia Framework	ISO/IEC 21000	2001
MPEG-A	Multimedia Application Format	ISO/IEC 23000	2007
MPEG-B	MPEG Systems Technologies	ISO/IEC 23001	2006
MPEG-C	MPEG Video Technologies	ISO/IEC 23002	2006
MPEG-D	MPEG Audio Technologies	ISO/IEC 23003	2007
MPEG-E	Multimedia Middleware	ISO/IEC 23004	2007
MPEG-V	Media Context and Control	ISO/IEC 23005	2011
MPEG-M	MPEG eXtensible Middleware	ISO/IEC 23006	2010
MPEG-U	Rich Media User Interfaces	ISO/IEC 23007	2010
MPEG-H	High Efficiency Coding and Media Delivery in Heterogeneous Environments	ISO/IEC 23008	2013
MPEG-DASH	Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP	ISO/IEC 23009	2012
MPEG-I	Coded Representation of Immersive Media	ISO/IEC 23090	2020
MPEG-CICP	Coding-Independent Code Points	ISO/IEC 23091	2018	Originally part of MPEG-B
MPEG-G	Genomic Information Representation	ISO/IEC 23092	2019
MPEG-IoMT	Internet of Media Things	ISO/IEC 23093	2019
MPEG-5	General Video Coding	ISO/IEC 23094	2020	Essential Video Coding and Low-Complexity Enhancement Video Coding
	Supplemental Media Technologies	ISO/IEC 29116	2008	Withdrawn and replaced by MPEG-M Part 4 – MPEG extensible middleware protocols