TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter provides information regarding MPEG technologies as well as available tools for encoding and working with various forms of MPEG, with a special focus on MPEG-4.
The founding of the Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG), established as an International Standards Organization (ISO) workgroup, dates back to the late 1980s. The workgroup's formal name is ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11. MPEG standards produced by the group have created exciting new opportunities throughout the media production community. The impact of this working group reaches further than most of us realize. MPEG formats have been central to some of the most successful new digital media formats to arrive in the past decade, including multimedia CD-ROMs, Video CD, DVD, and various forms of digital television delivery including digital terrestrial, satellite, and wireless services.
As a multimedia video format, MPEG was overshadowed during the 1990s by the excitement over proprietary streaming video formats from Apple, Microsoft, and RealNetworks. There's a good chance that the MPEG workgroup will soon take center stage in this new arena as well, with the widespread adoption of the new MPEG-4 standard. According to an analysis report from Penton Media (www.penton.com) presented in November 2001, MPEG-4 is expected to become the streaming media standard within three years. Through surveys with member companies of the Internet Streaming Media Alliance (www.ISMA.org) and the MPEG-4 Industry Forum (www.M4IF.org), the report found that 65 percent of respondents expect MPEG-4 to become the standard for streaming media within three years and...
