Moving Picture Experts Group

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For the Motion Picture Editors Guild also known as the MPEG, see Motion Picture Editors Guild.

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 May of 1988 in Ottawa, Canada. 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 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^{[citation needed]}) for DVDs.
MPEG-3: Originally designed for HDTV, but abandoned when it was discovered that MPEG-2 (with extensions) was sufficient for HDTV. (Do not confuse with MP3, which is MPEG-1 Layer 3.)
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:
- MPEG-4 Part 2 (or Advanced Simple Profile) and
- MPEG-4 Part 10 (or Advanced Video Coding or H.264). MPEG-4 Part 10 may be used on HD DVD and Blu-ray discs, along with VC-1 and MPEG-2.

In addition, the following standards, while not sequential advances to the video encoding standard as with MPEG-1 through MPEG-4, are referred to by similar notation:

MPEG-7: A formal system for describing multimedia content.
MPEG-21: MPEG describes this standard as a multimedia framework.