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12 - MPEG-4

Posted in Neothings by bill on the April 10th, 2006

From Wikipedia.org http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG4
MPEG-4, introduced in late 1998, is the designation for a group of audio and video coding standards and related technology agreed upon by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). The primary uses for the MPEG-4 standard are web (streaming media) and CD distribution, conversational (videophone), and broadcast television.
MPEG-4 absorbs many of the features of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 and other related standards, adding new features such as (extended) VRML support for 3D rendering, object-oriented composite files (including audio, video and VRML objects), support for externally-specified Digital Rights Management and various types of interactivity. AAC (Advanced Audio Codec) was standardized as an adjunct to MPEG-2 (as Part 7) before MPEG-4 was issued.
Most of the features included in MPEG-4 are left to individual developers to decide whether to implement them. This means that there are probably no complete implementations of the entire MPEG-4 set of standards. To deal with this, the standard includes the concept of “profiles” and “levels”, allowing a specific set of capabilities to be defined in a manner appropriate for a subset of applications.
The primary MPEG-4 audio codec, AAC is decoded/played by Apple’s iPod product line. Two video codecs included in MPEG-4, Simple Profile (SP) and Advanced Video Codec AVC, are decoded/played by the 5th Generation iPod (AKA the “video iPod”). However, neither the iPod nor Apple’s Quicktime Player are fully MPEG-4 compliant decoders, as they do not natively support many of the required parts of the standard.

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