The development of an integrated audiovisual coding standard: MPEG

These days companies from many industry segments are moving towards the adoption of digital technology for upgrading existing or introducing new services. This unstoppable movement prompted by technological progress could have produced the digital replica of the existing incompatible systems put in place in the analog world. It is the merit of MPEG to have provided an integrated audiovisual coding standard to implement this epochal conversion from one technology to another while supporting a universal syntax representing audiovisual information that makes the standard usable for a variety of interoperable applications. The paper presents the approach followed in the development of the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards and explains some of the basic technical elements. An overview of the current MPEG work is also given