The MPEG Video Standards – from 1 to 21

MP3 is Not MPEG3
It's the magical ability to squeeze the 1.4Mbps audio stream from a standard audio CD down to a sweet-sounding 128kbps that has made MP3 the de facto standard for digital music distribution. You can find MP3 support in every major media player on every computer platform, and dozens of consumer electronic devices can play MP3s. It's as close to a universal format for audio as you'll find.

MP3 is actually part of the MPEG1 standard. The audio portion of the MPEG1 spec contains three different compression schemes called layers. Of the three, Layer 3 provides the greatest audio quality and the greatest compression. At 8kbps, MP3 will sound like a phone call – intelligible, but nothing you'd ever call high-fidelity. Good-quality music starts at about 96kbps, but generally you'll want 128 or 160kbps to get "CD quality" reproduction.

MPEG2 is Digital Television
The MPEG2 standard builds upon MPEG1 to extend it to handle the highest-quality video applications. MPEG2 is a common standard for digital video transmission at all parts of the distribution chain. Broadcast distribution equipment, digital cable head-ends, video DVDs, and satellite television all employ MPEG2; as do point-to-point streaming devices like the vBrick.

You'll need special capture cards to encode MPEG2 in real-time on a PC. But in the streaming world, MPEG2 is a great source from which to transcode the various Real, WindowsMedia and Quicktime formats we serve to our viewers.

MPEG2 needs about 6Mbps to provide the quality you're used to seeing on movie DVDs, although data rates up to 15Mbps are supported. 720X480 is the typical 4:3 default resolution, while 1920x1080 provides support for 16:9 high-definition television.