MPEG-4 standard and resources index
Welcome to the IST 37 MPEG-4 pages.
This is the main index page for the IST 37 resources and commentary on MPEG-4. The standard is large and complex and so each part will be given its own section and a covering page which will be accessible from here. Here is a list of the differemnt parts. Right now there are 24:
| Part | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | Systems (including BIFS interactivity) |
| 2 | Visual (the simpler of the two video codecs) |
| 3 | Audio |
| 4 | Conformance testing |
| 5 | Reference software |
| 6 | Delivery Multimedia Integration Framework (DMIF) |
| 7 | Optimized reference software for coding of audio-visual objects |
| 8 | Carriage of ISO/IEC 14496 contents over IP networks |
| 9 | Reference hardware description |
| 9 | Reference hardware description |
| 10 | Advanced Video Coding (H.264) |
| 11 | Scene description and application engine |
| 12 | ISO base media file format |
| 13 | Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP) extensions |
| 14 | MP4 file format |
| 15 | Advanced Video Coding (AVC) file format |
| 16 | Animation Framework eXtension (AFX) |
| 17 | Streaming text format |
| 18 | Font compression and streaming |
| 19 | Synthesized texture stream |
| 20 | Lightweight Application Scene Representation (LASeR) and Simple Aggregation Format (SAF) |
| 21 | MPEG-J Graphics Framework eXtensions (GFX) |
| 22 | Open Font Format |
| 23 | Symbolic Music Representation |
| 24 | Audio and systems interaction |
Back in 1999, the MPEG-4 standard looked like it could be answer to the search for a genuinely portable and open standard for describing multimedia. Since then the standard has become a much larger body of work. More recently it appears to have become less popular although there are indications that people are looking at it again. As well as being large and complex, the patent licensing position is not altogether clear and you could find that you have to separately license the audio, video and interactive content. This places a significant administrative burden on anyone planning to adopt the standard. Anything that you can tell us about that process that will encourage more people to adopt the standard would be useful to know about.
The H.264/AVC/Part 10 codec work is probably what people most readily recognise. Often they think MPEG-4 is just another video codec. Of course it is much more than that.
An area that I would like to see exploited more is the BIFS and LASeR multimedia components. Historically, only a few people have attempted to work with those parts of the standard.
Those that I am aware of are:
| Company | Notes |
|---|---|
| Envivio | Developers of the authoring tools that we used in the BBC News Interactive group to buld the NewsNight demo package. |
| iVast | Some years ago, iVast was bought by DG2L. I think they may not be working on MPEG-4 now. They were the only other alterantive to Envivio for authoring BIFS. |
| Streamezzo | They are active in the mobile industry and using the LASeR specification. |
| Apple | Developers of the Wired QuickTime interactivity and the QT file format on which the MPEG-4 file format is based. They are from the same DNA so to speak. |
| IBM | There were some interestiong prototype demo packages available from an IBM research site. |
| Thomson | They were active in the early days and showed some interesting presentations but after becoming part of Grass Valley, this work wasn't publicised as much. |
| Phillips | Also one of the front runners back in the late 1990's. |
| BBC News Interactive | As far as I know, the most ambitious BIFS package built to date was a specially commissioned interactive version of the Newsnight programme. This was scripted and filmed specially and then authored using the Envivio tools. (circa 2003). |
Cliff Wootton - IST/37 MPEG-4 Resources Editor