MPEG Standards Explained

MPEG Standards are confusing to say the least. But we can weed out a few non-necessary details to get an idea of the popular standards in the AV scene.

1.1 Video

ITU-T Rec H.26x - MPEG-y Part z (Common Name) Year

• H.262 - MPEG-2 Part 2 (DVD Video) 1996
• H.264 - MPEG-4 Part 10 (AVC) 2004
• H.265 - MPEG-H Part 2 (HEVC) 2013
• H.266 - MPEG-I Part 3 (VVC) 2020

There is no reason to use H.262 video other than for preservation of already existing DVDs encoded using H.262. H.265 is emerging as the popular choice but royalty free options like AV1 are also proving their worth. H.266 is very much in infancy as of now.

!CAUTION! : MP4 is NOT MPEG-4 and MP3 is NOT MPEG-3. Very easy to get confused with but keep it in mind.

Trivia - As for where is MPEG-3. It was skipped because it was redundant with MPEG-2 being easily extensible to approach MPEG-3 goals.

1.2 Audio

• MP3 - MPEG-1 Part 3 (Old), MPEG-2 Part 3 (Current) - 2 channel (MPEG 1) or 6 channel (MPEG 2)
• AAC - MPEG-2 Part 7 (Old), MPEG-4 Part 3 (Current) - 48 channel audio

For all reasons avoid encoding audio using MP3. There are much better alternatives for lossy audio like AAC,OPUS, etc. Or better yet use FLAC or ALAC for loseless encoding.

1.3 Container

• MP4 - MPEG-4 Part 14 (.mp4, .m4a, .m4v, etc)

These can contain video (.m4v), audio (.m4a) or both (.mp4). It is recommended to use better containers like Matroska (MKV), WebM for media playback IFF it is supported by the playback device.

1.3.1 Bitstreams (No Container is used, just raw un-encapsulated data)

• .mp3 - MP3 Audio Stream with optional ID3 tags
• .aac - AAC Audio Stream with optional ID3 tags

These are usually just concatenated MP3/AAC frames. The .mp3 file extension is very common in the Music Piracy Scene.