Virtually all multimedia and internet video formats are derived from the MPEG encoding format. The MPEG was first released in 1993 by the Moving Picture Experts Group, and has now become the standard encoding format for computer based based multimedia.

The MPEG is an highly popular standard for encoding, and there is an mpeg decoder available on almost every popular operating system. MPEGs are currently available in 2 formats,MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 with a third format in the pipeline, MPEG-4.

For detailed information about MPEG formats, see video encoding types.

MPEG Video Layers
MPEGs are broken up into 4 layers to help with error handling, synchronisation and random search and editing. These are:

1. Video sequence 
This is any self contained bitstream, e.g. a coded video sequence.

2. Group of Pictures
This is the group of pictures which is composed of 1 or more groups of intra frames and/or non-intra pictures to be defined later.

3. Picture Layer
This is the actual picture layer itself.

4. Slice Layer
Each slice is a contiguous sequence of raster ordered macro blocks, most often on a row basis in typical video applications.

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