An elementary stream (ES) as defined by the
MPEG
The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by International Organization for Standardization, ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC that sets standards for media coding, includ ...
communication protocol is usually the output of an
audio encoder or
video encoder. An ES contains only one kind of data (e.g. audio, video, or closed caption). An elementary stream is often referred to as "elementary", "data", "audio", or "video"
bitstream
A bitstream (or bit stream), also known as binary sequence, is a sequence of bits.
A bytestream is a sequence of bytes. Typically, each byte is an 8-bit quantity, and so the term octet stream is sometimes used interchangeably. An octet may ...
s or streams. The format of the elementary stream depends upon the codec or data carried in the stream, but will often carry a common header when
packetized into a
packetized elementary stream.
Header for MPEG-2 video elementary stream
General layout of MPEG-1 audio elementary stream
The digitized sound signal is divided up into blocks of 384 samples in Layer I and 1152 samples in
Layers II and
III. The sound sample block is encoded within an audio frame:
* header
* error check
* audio data
* ancillary data
The header of a frame contains general information such as the MPEG Layer, the
sampling frequency, the number of channels, whether the frame is
CRC protected, whether the sound is the original:
Although most of this information may be the same for all frames, MPEG decided to give each audio frame such a header in order to simplify synchronization and bitstream editing.
See also
*
MP3
*
Packetized elementary stream
*
MPEG program stream
Program stream (PS or MPEG-PS) is a container format (digital), container format for multiplexing digital audio, video and more. The PS format is specified in MPEG-1 Part 1 (ISO/IEC 11172-1) and MPEG-2 Part 1, Systems (ISO/IEC standard 13818-1/ITU ...
*
MPEG transport stream
External links
ISO/IEC 11172-3:1993 Information technology -- Coding of moving pictures and associated audio for digital storage media at up to about 1,5 Mbit/s -- Part 3: Audio
{{Compression formats
MPEG