An Introduction to MPEG Video Compression

MPEG video compression is used in many current and emerging products. It is at the heart of digital television set-top boxes, DSS, HDTV decoders, DVD players, video conferencing, Internet video, and other applications. These applications benefit from video compression in the fact that they may require less storage space for archived video information, less bandwidth for the transmission of the video information from one point to another, or a combination of both. Besides the fact that it works well in a wide variety of applications, a large part of its popularity is that it is defined in two finalized international standards, with a third standard currently in the definition process.