H.262 or MPEG-2 Part 2 (formally known as ITU-T Recommendation H.262 and ISO/IEC 13818-2, also known as MPEG-2 Video) is a video coding format standardised and jointly maintained by ITU-T Study Group 16 Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), and developed with the involvement of many companies. It is the second part of the ISO/IEC MPEG-2 standard. The ITU-T Recommendation H.262 and ISO/IEC 13818-2 documents are identical. The standard is available for a fee from the ITU-T and ISO. MPEG-2 Video is very similar to MPEG-1, but also provides support for interlaced video (an encoding technique used in analog NTSC, PAL and SECAM television systems). MPEG-2 video is not optimized for low bit-rates (e.g., less than 1 Mbit/s), but somewhat outperforms MPEG-1 at higher bit rates (e.g., 3 Mbit/s and above), although not by a large margin unless the video is interlaced. All standards-conforming MPEG-2 Video decoders are also fully capable of playing back MPEG-1 Video streams. History The ISO/IEC approval process was completed in November 1994. The first edition was approved in July 1995 and published by ITU-T and ISO/IEC in 1996. Didier LeGall of Bellcore chaired the development of the standard and Sakae Okubo of NTT was the ITU-T coordinator and chaired the agreements on its requirements. The technology was developed with contributions from a number of companies. Hyundai Electronics (now SK Hynix) developed the first MPEG-2 SAVI (System/Audio/Video) decoder in 1995. The majority of patents that were later asserted in a patent pool to be essential for implementing the standard came from three companies: Sony (311 patents), Thomson (198 patents) and Mitsubishi Electric (119 patents). In 1996, it was extended by two amendments to include the registration of copyright identifiers and the 4:2:2 Profile. ITU-T published these amendments in 1996 and ISO in 1997. There are also other amendments published later by ITU-T and ISO/IEC. The most recent edition of the standard was published in 2013 and incorporates all prior amendments. Editions Video coding Picture sampling An HDTV camera with 8-bit sampling generates a raw video stream of 25 × 1920 × 1080 × 3 = 155,520,000 bytes per second for 25 frame-per-second video (using the 4:4:4 sampling format). This stream of data must be compressed if digital TV is to fit in the bandwidth of available TV channels and if movies are to fit on DVDs. Video compression is practical