Technical Q&As
QTICM 15 - Comparing MPEG to Cinepak (1-Aug-95)
Q How does MPEG compare to other compression schemes, such as Cinepak?
A MPEG is a standard. Video CDs that are somewhat popular in Europe have only
MPEG material. MPEG is a stream-based system with a highly interleaved data
content. An individual MPEG 'sample' can be over five minutes long, and MPEG
frames have both backward and forward temporal-compression dependencies. While
you can create an MPEG editor and add additional tracks, it is difficult, and
there is no standard in place yet for adding tracks.
QuickTime, which is a time-based-sample media format, makes it easy to edit and
rearrange samples, and has a finer granularity concerning media samples. The
track concept is already in place. Therefore, we recommend that you use MPEG
for playback and QuickTime for handling multimedia container-type media.
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