H.262

H.262 or MPEG-2 Part 2 (formally known as ITU-T Recommendation H.262 and ISO/IEC 13818-2, also known as MPEG-2 Video) is a video coding format developed and maintained jointly by ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It is the second part of the ISO/IEC MPEG-2 standard. The ITU-T Recommendation H.262 and ISO/IEC 13818-2 documents are identical. The standard is available for a fee from the ITU-T and ISO.

MPEG-2 Video is similar to MPEG-1, but also provides support for interlaced video (an encoding technique used in analog NTSC, PAL and SECAM television systems). MPEG-2 video is not optimized for low bit-rates (less than 1 Mbit/s), but outperforms MPEG-1 at 3 Mbit/s and above. All standards-conforming MPEG-2 Video decoders are fully capable of playing back MPEG-1 Video streams.

The ISO/IEC approval process was completed in November 1994. The first edition was approved in July 1995 and published by ITU-T and ISO/IEC in 1996.

In 1996 it was extended by two amendments to include the Registration of Copyright Identifiers and the 4:2:2 Profile. ITU-T published these amendments in 1996 and ISO in 1997.

There are also other amendments published later by ITU-T and ISO. The most recent edition of the standard was published in 2013 and incorporates all prior amendments.

An HDTV camera generates a raw video stream of 149,299,200 (=24*1920*1080*3) bytes per second for 24fps video. This stream must be compressed if digital TV is to fit in the bandwidth of available TV channels and if movies are to fit on DVDs. Fortunately, video compression is practical because the data in pictures is often redundant in space and time. For example, the sky can be blue across the top of a picture and that blue sky can persist for frame after frame. Also, because of the way the eye works, it is possible to delete some data from video pictures with almost no noticeable degradation in image quality.

TV cameras used in broadcasting usually generate 50 pictures a second (in Europe) or 59.94 pictures a second (in North America). Digital television requires that these pictures be digitized so that they can be processed by computer hardware. Each picture element (a pixel) is then represented by one luma number and two chrominance numbers. These describe the brightness and the color of the pixel (see YCbCr). Thus, each digitized picture is initially represented by three rectangular arrays of numbers.

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