MPEG is short for "Moving Picture Expert Group". This group, mainly composed of different experts from various firms, like Philips, Sony etc., focuses on developing various video and audio compression techniques. It meets about four times a year for a one-week conference. The main purpose of this group is to produce standard compressed example bitstreams which are then used individually by the manufacturers to create their own compression algorithms of MPEG.
The implementation is not the part of the MPEG groups. The group has produced MPEG-1 for use mainly in CD applications. The work of the MPEG group has been continued by the MPEG-2 group, which has produced the MPEG-2 standard for high quality compression and transmission of video and data. There are also the MPEG-3 (HDTV, not very active nowadays) and MPEG-4 (very low bitrate, video mobile phone) groups. One implementation of MPEG-1 & 2 is DVD-Video. The MPEGs belong to the group of lossy compression technology: they loose some or more of the original image data.
