MPEG-2 Standard

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

The MPEG2 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 MPEG2 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)

See ISO for a full list of MPEG2 standards documents.

You can buy all these documents from ISO, however they are quite expensive.

However, ITU comes to the rescue, as it allows any individual to download up to three documents for free (after registration)! http://ecs.itu.ch/cgi-bin/ebookshop/

As the MPEG2 Standard is a superset of the MPEG1 Standard, you will find that it refers to the MPEG1 standards douments (this is especially true for audio coding). You might need to read ISO-11172, too.