.mpeg vs .mpg

walkergm

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Is there any different between .mpeg and .mpg? I have a program (Flix Pro) that says that it can convert .mpeg, but when I try to bring in a movie with .mpg I get an error saying that it cannot import the file. Are the two the same?

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I should think so.

Try renaming.

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walkergm

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Thanks. I wanted to make should before I have the movie converted to .mpeg. Thanks for the quick reply.

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It depends. Both MPEG1 or MPEG2 format can have the file extension of .MPG or .MPEG . .MPG and .MPEG is pretty much the same container that data, such as Video and Audio, in this case, can hold.

The actual MPEG1 video format is generally lower quality than MPEG2.

Try downloading GSpot and see what it says about the video:

http://www.headbands.com/gspot/

anonymous

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some rambling...

MPEG stands for Motion Picture Experts Group. In the old days Windows 3.1 and DOS had an 8.3 naming convention: you could only have a maximum of 8 characters in the filename and a maximum of three characters in the extension. Hence the extension .mpg for mpeg. That wasn’t a limitation to, say, Unix users, who could name their files with .mpeg extensions if they wanted to. Even after Windows 95 and long filenames appeared, the .mpg extension stayed... so there you have it. I am not clear as to whether there exists an extensions naming convention for MPEG. I have seen MPEG-1 files with extensions mpg, mpeg, mpe, m1v (video only), mp2 (audio only), mpa (also audio only), mp2v, mpv2, mp2s. I don’t know if those extensions are also valid for mpeg-2 files or if there’s any convention on that. I have also seen mpeg-4 avi’s with the mpg extenion, but that’s generally not good practice.
As for your not being able to import the file the suggestion above to use gspot is probably the best idea. The file may not be an mpeg, but could have been renamed so (anyone who’s used file sharing knows how bad of a problem that is on there!)

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Good info, thanks :-)

I think it is very important to note that it’s possible to give a file any file extension you like, as anonymous said, but the important thing to find out is - what really is the video and audio made up of? GSpot will find this information.

Interestingly, the MPG container format (not to be confused with just the file extension .mpg) supports MPEG4 video, so you can put DivX or XviD video encoded content inside an authentic MPG container.

Hhmm, I just realised that walkergm had just renamed the file to get it to work. It’s pretty interesting that the Flix Pro program needs to have it have a file extension of .mpeg for it to recognise it