Moving Picture Experts Group

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The Moving Picture Experts Group or MPEG is a working group of ISO/IEC charged with the development of video and audio encoding standards. Its first meeting was in 1988 in Hanover. As of late 2005, MPEG has grown to include approximately 350 members per meeting from various industries, universities, and research institutions. MPEG's official designation is ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29 WG11.

MPEG (pronounced EM-peg) has standardized the following compression formats and ancillary standards:

MPEG-1: Initial video and audio compression standard. Later used as the standard for Video CD, and includes the popular Layer 3 (MP3) audio compression format.
MPEG-2: Transport, video and audio standards for broadcast-quality television. Used for over-the-air digital television ATSC, DVB and ISDB, digital satellite TV services like Dish Network, digital cable television signals, and (with slight modifications) for DVD video discs.
MPEG-3: Originally designed for HDTV, but abandoned when it was discovered that MPEG-2 was sufficient for HDTV.
MPEG-4: Expands MPEG-1 to support video/audio "objects", 3D content, low bitrate encoding and support for Digital Rights Management. Several new (newer than MPEG-2 Video) higher efficiency video standards are included (an alternative to MPEG-2 Video), notably, Advanced Simple Profile and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.
MPEG-7: A formal system for describing multimedia content.
MPEG-21: MPEG describes this future standard as a multimedia framework.