Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

MPEG (.mpg or .mpeg)

MPEG is a set of multimedia standards created by the Moving Picture Experts Group. It supports three types of information: video, audio, and streaming (which, in the context of MPEG compression, is synchronized video and audio).

MPEG was initially popular as a web format because it was the only format that could be produced on the Unix system.

MPEG files offer extremely high compression rates with little loss of quality. They accomplish this using a lossy compression technique that strips out data that is not discernible to the human ear or eye.

There are a number of MPEG standards. MPEG-1 was originally developed for video transfer at VHS quality. MPEG-2 is a higher-quality standard that was developed for television broadcast and DVD authoring. The most recent released standard is MPEG-4, made popular by its support by QuickTime (though MPEG-4 support is not limited to QuickTime).

MPEGs can be compressed using one of three schemes, Layer-I, -II, or -III. The complexity of the coding (and therefore the processor power needed to encode and decode) increases at each level. Due to this complexity, you need special encoding tools to produce MPEG videos.

MPEG-1 (which uses the .mpg or .mpeg suffix) is the most appropriate format for web purposes. MPEG-2 files are rare except in broadcast studios and on DVDs and are not well suited for web delivery. MPEG-4 is proving to be an attractive option for web video.

To learn more about MPEG, visit the MPEG web site (http://www.mpeg.org ...