ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the multimedia standards including video coding; image coding, audio coding, multimedia interface, and multimedia framework. It describes the technical details of major multimedia coding and multimedia interface as well as multimedia framework standards. From the history of multimedia standards development, it can be summarized that a successful multimedia standard, which is widely accepted by the industry and extensively used in many applications, should have several important features. The concept that should be mentioned is that for multimedia applications the source information includes not only video and image but also audio as well as data. The different sources of information are all converted into the digital format referred to as elementary bitstreams at the source coding layer. Moving Pictures Expert Group-4 aims at providing coding tools for multimedia environment, these tools not only allow one to efficiently compress natural video objects, but also compress synthetic objects, which are a subset of the larger class of computer graphics.
