Who we are

The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is a working group of ISO/IEC in charge of the development of international standards for compression, decompression, processing, and coded representation of moving pictures, audio and their combination. So far MPEG has produced:

• MPEG-1, the standard for storage and retrieval of moving pictures and audio on storage media (approved Nov. 1992)

• MPEG-2, the standard for digital television (approved Nov. 1994)

• MPEG-4, the standard for multimedia applications 

  • version 1 was approved Oct. 1998

  • version 2 was approved Dec. 1999.

MPEG is in the last phases of development of:

• MPEG-4 versions 3, 4 and 5

• MPEG-7 the content representation standard for multimedia information search, filtering, management and processing (to be approved July 2001).

and is now in the full development phase of:

• MPEG-21, the multimedia framework.

MPEG usually holds three meetings a year. These comprise plenary meetings and subgroup meetings on Requirements, Systems, Multimedia Description Schemes, Video, Audio, Synthetic Natural Hybrid Coding, Test, Implementation Studies and Liaison. MPEG meetings are attended by over 300 experts from over 20 countries.