MPEG-2 Standard

The Moving Picture Coding Experts Group (MPEG) was established by Leonardo Chiariglione in January 1988.

The MPEG-2 Standard is defined in ISO-13818, which is comprised of the following documents (some of them are also published by ITU):

• ISO-13818-1 aka ITU-T H.222.0

  Systems (definition of the MPEG-2 Stream Formats, the decoder model and the timing/synchronization model)

• ISO-13818-2 aka ITU-T H.262

  Video

• ISO-13818-3

  Audio

• ISO-13818-4

  Conformance testing (read if you want to write a multiplexer or an encoder)

• ISO-13818-6

  DSM-CC (Digital Storage Media Command and Control, used to transmit MHP applications and other data

• ISO-13818-7

  Advanced Audio Coding (AAC)

For a full list of the MPEG-2 standard's documents, see the ISO website.

In addition, given that the MPEG-2 Standard is a superset of the MPEG-1 Standard, you will find that it will, in places, refer to the older MPEG-1 standards documents (especially in the case of audio coding), so you may wish to read ISO-11172 as well.

Also See

• The DVB Standard
• The ATSC Standard

External Links

• You can buy all of the above documents from the ISO website; however they are quite expensive.
• ITU, on the other hand, comes to the rescue by permitting any individual to (after registration) download up to three documents for free.
• Wikipedia's MPEG-2 article
• Wikipedia's MPEG article