Fundamentals and Evolution of MPEG-2 Systems: Paving the MPEG Road

7MPEG-1 Systems: Laying the MPEG-2 Foundation

The important issues to solve when building an MPEG system that works fine. How to achieve a constant end-to-end delay, given the delays due to video coding, audio coding and packetization of video and audio. How to synchronize video and audio at players and how to model the decoding process, so as accurately specify required buffer resources for players. Use of the decoding model to accurately specify compliance of streams and players.

7.1 Driving Forces

At the time the MPEG-1 effort started, developments were ongoing in the consumer electronics industry to define a system for the playback of audiovisual content from Compact Disc; see also Chapter 2 of this book. The aim of MPEG was to offer an open standard suitable not only for Compact Disc, but also for other media, such as Hard Disc and telecommunication networks, so as to enable technology convergence between consumer, computer and telecom applications and to improve the conditions for a mass market on multimedia to evolve.

The timely availability of the MPEG-1 standard was an important condition for its success. Failure to get timely results would likely cause the establishment of multiple incompatible standards. Video compression is the most critical element in achieving the above, and therefore MPEG agreed a tight methodology to specify the MPEG video standard. For the work to be carried out, three phases were defined [1–3] (see also Note 7.1). The aim was to define the ...