MPEG-1
Coding of moving pictures and associated audio
for digital storage media at up to about 1,5 Mbit/s
MPEG-1 is a standard in 5 parts:
ISO/IEC
11172-1:1993 Information technology -- Coding of moving
pictures and associated audio for digital storage media at up to
about 1,5 Mbit/s -- Part 1: Systems
ISO/IEC
11172-2:1993 Information technology -- Coding of moving
pictures and associated audio for digital storage media at up to
about 1,5 Mbit/s -- Part 2: Video
ISO/IEC
11172-3:1993 Information technology -- Coding of moving
pictures and associated audio for digital storage media at up to
about 1,5 Mbit/s -- Part 3: Audio
ISO/IEC
11172-4:1995 Information technology -- Coding of moving
pictures and associated audio for digital storage media at up to
about 1,5 Mbit/s -- Part 4: Conformance testing
ISO/IEC TR
11172-5 Information technology -- Coding of moving pictures
and associated audio for digital storage media up to about 1,5
Mbit/s -- Part 5: Software simulation
Part 1 addresses the problem of combining one or more
data streams from the video and audio parts of the MPEG-1
standard with timing information to form a single stream as in
Figure 1 below. This is an important fuction because, once
combined into a single stream, the data are in a form well suited
to digital storage or transmission.

Figure 1 -- Prototypical ISO/IEC 11172
decoder.
Part 2 specifies a coded representation that can be
used for compressing video sequences - both 625-line and
525-lines - to bitrates around 1,5 Mbit/s. Part 2 was developed
to operate principally from storage media offering a continuous
transfer rate of about 1,5 Mbit/s. Nevertheless it can be used
more widely than this because the approach taken is generic.
A number of techniques are used to achieve a high compression
ratio. The first is to select an appropriate spatial resolution
for the signal. The algorithm then uses block-based motion
compensation to reduce the temporal redundancy. Motion
compensation is used for causal prediction of the current picture
from a previous picture, for non-causal prediction of the current
picture from a future picture, or for interpolative prediction
from past and future pictures. The difference signal, the
prediction error, is further compressed using the discrete cosine
transform (DCT) to remove spatial correlation and is then
quantised. Finally, the motion vectors are combined with the DCT
information, and coded using variable length codes.
Figure 2 below illustrates a possible combination of the three
main types of pictures that are used in the standard.

Figure 2 -- Example of temporal picture
structure.
Part 3 specifies a coded representation that can be
used for compressing audio sequences - both mono and stereo. The
algorithm is illustrated in Figure 3 below. Input audio samples
are fed into the encoder. The mapping creates a filtered and
subsampled representation of the input audio stream. A
psychoacoustic model creates a set of data to control the
quantiser and coding. The quantiser and coding block creates a
set of coding symbols from the mapped input samples. The block
'frame packing' assembles the actual bitstream from the output
data of the other blocks, and adds other information (e.g. error
correction) if necessary.

Figure 3 -- Basic structure of the audio
encoder
Part 4 specifies how tests can be designed to verify
whether bitstreams and decoders meet the requirements as
specified in parts 1, 2 and 3 of the MPEG-1 standard. These tests
can be used by:
- manufacturers of encoders, and their customers, to verify
whether the encoder produces valid bitstreams.
- manufacturers of decoders and their customers to verify
whether the decoder meets the requirements specified in
parts 1,2 and 3 of the standard for the claimed decoder
capabilities.
- applications to verify whether the characteristics of a
given bitstream meet the application requirements, for
example whether the size of the coded picture does not
exceed the maximum value allowed for the application.
Part 5, technically not a standard, but a technical report, gives a
full software implementation of the first three parts of the MPEG-1
standard. The source code is not publicly available.
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