MPEG-2 is the codec that made digital television possible. Standardised in 1995, it became the foundation of DVD, the original digital broadcast TV (DVB in Europe, ATSC in the US), satellite TV, and pretty much every digital video pipeline of the late 1990s and 2000s. Three generations of video engineers grew up assuming MPEG-2 was the default; everything since has been a successor to it.
By modern standards MPEG-2 is extremely inefficient — it needs roughly 4× the bitrate of H.264 for the same visual quality. That's why nothing in streaming uses it anymore: a 1080p MPEG-2 stream would need ~20–30 Mbps where H.264 manages comfortably on 5–8. The compression techniques it pioneered (block-based encoding, motion estimation, DCT transforms, I/P/B frames) are still the foundation of every modern codec, but the implementation details have been dramatically improved.
You'll still encounter MPEG-2 in three places in 2026. Legacy broadcast feeds in countries that haven't upgraded their transmission standards. Archive material on old DVDs and TV recordings. MPEG-TS transport streams for some live broadcast and IPTV systems — even when the actual video inside is H.264 or HEVC, the container is often still MPEG-2 Transport Stream. For new projects, MPEG-2 is purely a legacy concern: don't choose it, but be ready to transcode away from it when ingesting old material.
