MPEG-2

MPEG-2 is a video and audio compression standard developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group, standardized in 1994, and widely adopted for digital television broadcasting, DVD-Video, and satellite transmission. It employs the discrete cosine transform for intra-frame compression and motion-compensated prediction for inter-frame compression, achieving compression ratios that made digital broadcast economically feasible.

MPEG-2's architecture established the template for subsequent video codecs: transform coding, quantization, motion estimation, and entropy coding. The standard's design decisions — particularly its use of fixed 8×8 DCT blocks and simple motion vectors — were optimized for the hardware capabilities of the 1990s, and they shaped the infrastructure of global television for two decades.

MPEG-2 is the forgotten foundation of digital media. Its technical compromises are still with us, encoded into broadcast standards and DVD libraries that will outlive the hardware designed to play them.