Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) is a video codec where each video field is separately compressed into a JPEG image. The resulting quality is independent from the motion in the image which differs from MPEG video where quality often decreases when footage contains lots of movement.
M-JPEG is best suited for broadcast resolution interlaced video (720x486 D1 NTSC or 720x576 PAL). Because it is designed for interlaced video, M-JPEG is not well suited for movies that are smaller than television resolution. Movies designed to be viewed on progressive scan computer monitors (like web movies or CD-ROM videogames) are ill suited for M-JPEG.
The bitrate falls between uncompressed formats (like RGB [compression 1:1] and YUV [compression 1:1.5 to 1:2.5]) and MPEG (1:100) Data rates in the range of (29Mb/s) are very high quality, but also result in comparatively large file sizes.
