page_title: MPEG transport stream
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: MPEG transport stream / Overview
context_page_description: MPEG transport stream or simply transport stream is a standard digital container format for transmission and storage of audio, video, and Program and System Information Protocol data. It is used in broadcast systems such as DVB, ATSC and IPTV.
  Transport stream specifies a container format encapsulating packetized elementary streams, with error correction and synchronization pattern features for maintaining transmission integrity when the communication channel carrying the stream is degraded.
  Transport streams differ from the similarly-named MPEG program stream in several important ways: program streams are designed for reasonably reliable media, such as discs, while transport streams are designed for less reliable transmission, namely terrestrial or satellite broadcast. Further, a transport stream may carry multiple programs.
  Transport stream is specified in MPEG-2 Part 1, Systems, formally known as ISO/IEC standard 13818-1 or ITU-T Rec. H.222.0.
context_section_description: A transport stream encapsulates a number of other substreams, often packetized elementary streams (PESs) which in turn wrap the main data stream using the MPEG codec or any number of non-MPEG codecs (such as AC3 or DTS audio, and MJPEG or JPEG 2000 video), text and pictures for subtitles, tables identifying the streams, and even broadcaster-specific information such as an electronic program guide. Many streams are often mixed together, such as several different television channels, or multiple angles of a movie. 
  Each stream is chopped into (at most) 188-byte sections and interleaved together; because of the tiny packet size, streams can be interleaved with less latency and greater error resilience compared to program streams and other common containers such as AVI, MOV/MP4, and MKV, which generally wrap each frame into one packet. This is particularly important for videoconferencing, where large frames may introduce unacceptable audio delay.
  Transport streams tend to be broadcast as constant bitrate (CBR) and filled with padding bytes when not enough data exists.
caption: Multiple MPEG programs are combined then sent to a transmitting antenna. The receiver parses and decodes one of the streams.