ISO standards developed by MPEG are made available in the form of textual specifications and whenever applicable also in the form of a reference software implementations of the standard and normative process to be performed. In the case of compressed audiovisual data, the reference software provides an implementation of the normative decoding process providing the values of output pixels or audio samples that all normative decoders are supposed to produce at their outputs. Reference encoders, whenever provided, are in general non-normative being only examples of possible encoding processes.

The textual specifications of ISO standards are available on the ISO web site together with the corresponding reference software parts. Different versions of the reference SW providing additional functionality or degrees of optimizations are also made available as direct additional ISO Standard Parts in the form of Technical Annexes (TA). In other cases, they take the form of open source projects and are made available to the public by the project promoters themselves outside of ISO (see for example the genie project).

In general, the encoding process is not normative and not specified as any encoding algorithm able to produce a syntactically conformant bitstream is conformant with the standard. This approach enables:

• The continuous progress of the encoding technology without the need to update the standard, but only the encoder implementations;
• The development of encoding solution addressing different requirements in terms of performance (speed/compression ratio) and resources consumption (high/low power).

ISO was founded with the idea of answering a fundamental question: “what’s the best way of doing this?”

It started with the obvious things like weights and measures, and over the last 50 years has developed into an extremely wide family of standards that cover everything from the shoes we stand in, to the Wi-Fi networks that invisibly connect us to each other.

When dealing with products conforming to International Standards, product manufacturers can have confidence that:

1. Solutions can be developed relying on a comprehensive specification which is maintained over time by ISO and will always be openly available.
2. Products can interoperate seamlessly; which means that devices from one manufacturer can work with other devices independently developed by other manufacturers.
3. New products can be developed at any moment in time in case the manufacturers of existing components should go out of business.
4. Product deployment will be subject to openly available, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing terms as required by the ISO patent policy.

Moreover, International Standards ensure that end-users:

1. are not locked into proprietary solutions, but can switch from technology providers to any other without changing the standard components of their own products;
2. will always be able to use and retrieve their data thanks to the open availability of the standard specifications;
3. will be able to transparently share their data without the need to adapt them according to the nature of the receiving device.

Regulators and governments count on ISO standards to help develop better regulation, knowing they have a sound basis thanks to the involvement of ISO as a governing entity supervising the standards development process.

International standards are technical specifications developed by international standards organizations. International standards are available for consideration and use worldwide, and the most prominent organization developing international standards is the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

MPEG-G is an international standard being developed jointly by ISO and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission). The official ISO/IEC name for MPEG-G is ISO/IEC 23092. MPEG-G has been jointly developed by MPEG, a working group of ISO/IEC, formally ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11, and Working Group 5 of ISO/TC 276 Biotechnology.