This article is from the MPEG FAQ, by Frank Gadegast phade@cs.tu-berlin.de with numerous contributions by others.
The DCT and Huffman algorithms receive the most press coverage (e.g.
"MPEG is a DCT based scheme with Huffman coding"), but are in fact less
significant when compared to the variety of coding modes signaled to
the decoder as context-dependent side information. The MPEG-1 and
MPEG-2 IDCT has the same definition as H.261, H.263, JPEG.
 
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