Glossary

Mb/s - Megabits per second.

Megabit - One million bits.

Megabyte - 1,000,000 bytes, or 1,000 kilobytes (see Byte).

millions of instructions per second (MIPS) - This is a common measure of the speed of a computer processor.

modem (MOdulator-DEModulator) - A device that converts digital data into analog signals and vice-versa for transmission over a telephone line.

Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) - A committee formed by the ISO to set stan-dards for digital compression of full-motion video. Also stands for the digital compression standard created by this committee.

MPEG-1 - An international standard for the digital compression of VHS-quality, full-motion video.

MPEG-2 - An international standard for the digital compression of broadcast-quality, full-motion video.

MPEG-3 - An international standard for the digital compression of broadcast-quality, audio.

Multicast - The transmission of information over the Internet to two or more users at the same time.

multiplexing - Transmitting multiple signals over a single communications line or computer channel. The two common multiplexing techniques are frequency division multiplexing, which separates signals by modulating the data onto different carrier frequencies, and time division multiplexing, which separates signals by interleaving bits one after the other.