ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concepts of profiles and levels when one looks at Motion Picture Experts Group – 2 (MPEG-2) source coding. It focuses on to channel coding, that revisit profiles and levels to see how they help to organize MPEG-2 – a forest in itself – into groves of manageable proportions. MPEG-2 is expected to cover a very wide spectrum of applications. On the low end, it is useful for low level videoconferencing and image database storage and retrieval. In the middle, it is intended for all kinds of entertainment distribution including broadcasting, satellite, cable, telco, and packaged media. At the high end, it covers applications of high definition television, some of which are not even achievable on a practical basis with current production technology. If MPEG-2 were a unitary standard, each encoder and decoder would have to process the signals for the entire range of applications.
