H.262

H.262 or MPEG-2 Part 2 (formally, ISO/IEC 13818-2) is a video coding format standardized 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.

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.