The Moving Picture Experts Group

About MPEG

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. Read MPEG's Terms of reference.

MPEG usually holds four meetings a year. These comprise plenary meetings and subgroup meetings on Requirements, Systems, Video, Video coding, 3D Video Audio, 3D Graphics and Communication. Participation is open to experts duly accredited by an appropriate National Standards Body. On average a meeting is attended by more than 400 experts from some 20 countries representing more than 200 companies spanning all industry domains with a stake in digital audio, video and multimedia.

MPEG is currently exploring new opportunities for standards serving the needs of the media industry. A partial list is:

Audio Synchronization Using audio to synchronise devices
Immersive Video definition of the standardisation field of Free-viewpoint Television (FTV)
Additional Support for Coding of Interlaced Video in HEVC Exploration on the possible addition of interlace-specific coding tools in HEVC
3D Printing A 3D Printer is seen as an actuator in MPEG-V
Real Time Streaming of Files Further MMT and DASH specification
Big Media Architecture for Big Data applied to Media
Network Distributed Media Coding Support for transcoding
Hybrid Natural/Synthetic Scene Container File format for 3D scenes
In advance signalling of MPEG containers content Signalling in advance of MPEG containers content
Adaptive delivery and access to Immersive Media To define an interface to deliver and access immersive media
Data Compression Investigations on possible new areas requiring compression standards
MPEG-21 Based Smart Contracts To express MPEG-21 contracts as Smart Contracts of specific blockchains
Video Coding for Machines The MPEG activity on Video Coding for Machines (VCM) aims to standardize a bitstream format generated by compressing both a video stream and previously extracted features. The bitstream should enable multiple machine vision tasks
Video Coding for Machines The MPEG activity on Video Coding for Machines (VCM) aims to standardize a bitstream format generated by compressing both a video stream and previously extracted features. The bitstream should enable multiple machine vision tasks

MPEG standards

This is the full list of standards produced. Many of these standards are being actively extended with new parts as exploration activities become full-fledged standardisation activities. The standard "Exploration" with the fictitious ISO number 99999 is a container of exploration activities and have no official status.

ISO # Title Name Description
99999 Exploration Collection of explorations A suite of exploration activities likely to become standards or parts of standards
23094 MPEG-5 General Video Coding Standard to collect video coding parts
23093 MPEG-IoMT Internet of Media Things APIs for communicating media devices (called Media Things)
23092 MPEG-G Genomic Information Representation A suite of standards to providenew effective and interoperable solutions for genomic information processing applications
23091 MPEG-CICP Coding-independent code-points A suite of standards to specify code points for non-standard specific media formats
23090 MPEG-I Coded Representation of Immersive Media A collection of standards to digitally represent immersive media
23009 MPEG-DASH Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP DASH is a suite of standards providing a solution for the efficient and easy streaming of multimedia using existing available HTTP infrastructure (particularly servers and CDNs, but also proxies, caches, etc.).
23008 MPEG-H High Efficiency Coding and Media Delivery in Heterogeneous Environments Suite of standards for heterogeneous environment delivery of audio-visual information compressed with high efficiency
23007 MPEG-U MPEG Rich Media User Interface Specification of the exchange, the display, the control and the communication of widgets with other entities and for data format for advanced user interaction (AUI) interfaces to support various advanced user interaction devices.. MPEG-U provides a general purpose technology with innovative functionality that enable its use in heterogeneous scenarios such as broadcast, mobile, home network and web domains:
23006 MPEG-M Multimedia Service Platform Technologies MPEG-M is a suite of standards to enable the easy design and implementation of media-handling value chains whose devices interoperate because they are all based on the same set of technologies, especially MPEG technologies accessible from the middleware and multimedia services
23005 MPEG-V Media Context and Control MPEG-V outlines an architecture and specifies associated information representations to enable interoperability between virtual worlds (e.g., digital content provider of a virtual world, gaming, simulation), and between real and virtual worlds( e.g., sensors, actuators, vision and rendering, robotics). Please see http://wg11.sc29.org/mpeg-v/ for a detailed spacification.
23004 MPEG-E MPEG Multimedia Middleware A standard for an Application Programming Interface (API) of Multimedia Middleware (M3W) that can be used to provide a uniform view to an interoperable multimedia middleware platform.
23003 MPEG-D MPEG Audio Technologies A suite of standards for Audio technologies that do not fall in other MPEG standards
23002 MPEG-C MPEG Video Technologies A suite of video standards that do not fall in other well-established MPEGVideo standards
23001 MPEG-B MPEG Systems Technologies A suite of standards for systems technologies that do not fall in other well-established MPEG standards
23000 MPEG-A Application Formats A suite of standards specifying application formats that involve multiple MPEG and, where required, non MPEG standards
21000 MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework A suite of standard that define a normative open framework for end-to-end multimedia creation, delivery and consumption that provides content creators, producers, distributors and service providers with equal opportunities in the MPEG-21 enabled open market, and also be to the benefit of the content consumers providing them access to a large variety of content in an interoperable manner.
18039 MPEG-MAR Mixed and Augmented Reality Reference Model A Mixed and Augmented Reality Reference Model developed jointly with SC 24/WG 9
15938 MPEG-7 Multimedia Content Description Interface A suite of standards for description and search of audio, visual and multimedia content
14496 MPEG-4 Coding of audio-visual objects A suite of standards for multimedia for the fixed and mobile web.
13818 MPEG-2 Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio A suite for standards for digital television
11172 MPEG-1 Coding of moving pictures and associated audio at up to about 1.5 Mbit/s A suite of standards for audio-video and systems particularly designed for digital storage media