Until recently, the high system cost of MPEG encoding limited it to the pro
fessional and high-end consumer market. The introduction of the first singl
e chip MPEG encoder, the MB86390, has now opened MPEG to a wide area of app
lications, where the combination of digital video compression and high syst
em integration combined with low cost is required. This feature sets the ne
w scene with a discussion of the MPEG standard and moves on to system desig
n examples and considerations.