Evolution of MPEG standards
MPEG-1 (’93) ... for 1.5 Mbit/s transmission, near VHS-quality. Encoding based on macro-blocks;
MPEG-2 (’95) ... allows data rates up to 100 MBit/s. Used for digital TV, DVDs and broadcasting units;
MPEG-4 (’01) ... suitable for lower data rates between 10 KBit/s and 1 MBit/s. Good quality object-based encoding that will enable object-based interactions for users, but just out of reach for now;
MPEG-7 under development, basically will be an XML-like content descriptor stream;