MPEG Movies

MPEG (pronounced M-peg), which stands for Moving Picture Experts Group, is the nickname given to a family of International Standards used for coding audio-visual information in a digital compressed format. The MPEG family of standards includes MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, formally known as ISO/IEC-11172, ISO/IEC-13818 and ISO/IEC-14496.

MPEG Movies is a very general movie format that can be played on many different platforms, and which combines a high compression rate with a relatively high viewing quality.

MPEG Movies must be converted to QuickTime format for analysis in VideoPoint QuickTime Pro, version 5 or 6, can do this conversion. Open the MPEG Movies in the QuickTime Player, Choose File/Export from the QuickTime Player menu bar. "Movie to QuickTime Movie" is the Export choice you want. You can also click "Options" to choose your codec, after saving the resulting QuickTime movie, check it for dropped or repeating frames. Some MPEG Movies may not be suitable for analysis due to an excessive number of dropped or repeating frames. Others may exhibit enough regularity to be salvaged. For example, some Sony Mavica MPEGs seem to have each unique frame in triplicate. You can use VideoPoint Capture to remove such regularly duplicated frames.

How to create MPEG Movies: MPEG Movies may be created by saving a series of displayed images and then encoding them into an Mpeg file. To do this, open the ``MPEG control...'' control panel as described above, and press the <Save frames> button. Each subsequently displayed image will be saved to disk as the next frame for the final movie. Remember to release this button if you do not want to save the next image in this way. Once all frames have been saved, release the <Save frames> button, enter a file name in the <MPEG file name> data entry box (remembering to press return), press the <Create MPEG> button, and re-execute the network. The saved frames will be encoded into an MPEG file.

How to download MPEG Movies: If you were looking to download DVD movies, what would you do? Most people use Google, etc and search for their favorite movie. Then 100's of sites appear that claim that you can get free movies. Then all of a sudden you are bombarded by an explosion of pop-up windows! And then you discover that there are no movies in the actual website! There are many software which can helps you to download full length Mpeg Movies.

Many www servers contain a lot of MPEG Movies with sound. Most of them are several minutes long. This section tells you how to play them on a DOS/Windows machine. If you have a Mac or if you are working on a Unix machine I'm afraid you're out of luck.

To play the MPEG Movies on this server you will need:

·       A 486/25 MHz machine or better.

·       A sound card that can play 8 bit 11 KHz mono WAVe files. (that's about the minimum for a decent soundcard)

·       A fast video card, preferably one of the cards for which Xing's player has a native driver. Depending on how fast your video card and PC is you will be able to play the movies up to a resolution of 320x240 pixels (that's a quarter of a standard VGA screen).