MPEG-4 Cedar Wingate MUMT 621 Slide Presentation I Professor Ichiro Fujinaga September 24, 2009

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is an ISO/IEC standard developed by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) International effort involving hundreds of researchers and engineers from all over the world. Formal ISO/IEC designation is ISO/IEC 14496, was finalized in October 1998 and became an International Standard in the first months of Builds on the proven success of three fields – Digital television – Interactive graphics applications (synthetic content) – Interactive multimedia (World Wide Web, distribution of and access to content) MPEG-4 provides the standardized technological elements enabling the integration of the production, distribution and content access paradigms of the three fields. Based on QuickTime architecture (description from MPEG-Industry Forum A)

Goals Designed to scale down – Originally designed as a teleconferencing tool – Dial-up internet bandwidths – Small devices. i.e. cell phones and PDAs

Features Container format – Combine different multimedia streams into one file Streamable Backwards compatible Dynamic presentation engine – Media Objects Audio (including Structured Audio), Speech, Synthetic, 3D, 2D, Text, etc. – Interactivity – Composition takes place after decoding instead of before encoding Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP)

Structured Audio Elements Structured audio has five elements SAOL (Structured Audio Orchestra Language) – signal processing language for describing musical instruments SASL (Structured Audio Score Language) – language for describing performance using instruments of SAOL program SASBF (Structured Audio Sound Band Format) – allows the transmission of sample banks. Scheduler Description – used to translate MIDI or SASL to events internally in a decoder References to MIDI – supported MIDI messages and their meaning

Implementations File formats and codecs that use the MPEG-4 toolbox – AAC (Apple Quicktime) – XviD – DivX5 (developed from the “DivX ;-)” format) – ffmpeg – 3ivx – Nero Digital

Parts Many additions to MPEG-4 – Part 1 Systems – Part 2 Visual – Part 3 Audio – Part 4 Conformance defines how to test an MPEG-4 implementation – Part 5 gives a significant body of Reference Software, that can be used to start implementing the standard, and that serves as an example of how to do things. – Part 6 DMIF (Delivery Multimedia Integration Framework) defines an interface between application and network/storage. – Part 7 of MPEG-4 defines an optimized video encoder (in addition to the Reference Software, which is a correct, but not necessarily optimal implementation of the standard) – Part 8: Transport is in principle not defined in the standard, but part 8 defines how to map MPEG-4 streams onto IP transport. – Part 9: Reference Hardware Description, Phase 1 Hardware Accelerators, Phase 2 Optimized Reference Software integration through Virtual Socket – Part 10: Advanced Video Coding (the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video compression standard) This is the standard that is used in Blu-Ray DVD, HD-DVD, and videos from the iTunes store – Part 11: Scene description (to be split off from part 1) – Part 12: ISO Media File Format. – Part 13 : IPMP Extensions. – Part 14 : MP4 File Format (based on part 12). – Part 15 : AVC File Format (also based on part 12). – Part 16 : AFX (Animation Framework eXtensions) and MuW (Multi-user Worlds). – Part 17: Time Text subtitle format – Part 18: Font Compression and Streaming (for OpenType fonts). – Part 19: Synthesized Texture Stream. – Part 20: Lightweight Application Scene Representation (LASeR) – Part 21: MPEG-J Graphical Framework eXtension (GFX) – Part 22: Open Font Format Specification (OFFS) based on JOpenType – Part 23: Symbolic Music Representation (SMR)

Timeline 1998 – Parts 1 (Systems), 2 (Visual), 3 (Audio), and 6 (DMIF) adopted – Parts 4 (Testing) and 5 (Reference) adopted. – The fully backward compatible extensions under the title of MPEG-4 Version 2 were frozen at the end of – Parts 7 (Optimized video encoding) and 8 (4 on IP framework) adopted – Part 10, advanced video compression is incorporated into MPEG – Part 14 (MP4 filename)

Bibliography Bouthililier, Larry. “The MPEG Video Standards – from 1 to 21.” Streaming Media. (accessed September 22, 2009). Doom9 Forum contributors. “MP4 FAQ.” Doom9’s Forum. (accessed September 22, 2009). Jacobs, Stephen. “Start at the beginning: An MPEG Timeline.” Streaming Media, (accessed September 22, 2009). Koenen, Rob. “Overview of the MPEG-4 Standard.” International Organisation for Standardisation. (accessed September 22, 2009) MPEG-4 Industry Forum contributor. (A) “MPEG-4 – The Media Standard.” MPEG-4 Industry Forum, (accessed September 22, 2009) MPEG-4 Industry Forum contributor. (B) “What is MPEG-4?” MPEG Industry Forum. (accessed September 22, 2009) Wikipedia contributors. “MPEG-4.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. (accessed September 22, 2009). Wikipedia contributors. “H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. (accessed September 22, 2009). Zoia, Giorgio. "MPEG Technologies: Structured Audio." International Organisation for Standardisation. (accessed September 22, 2009) (accessed September 22, 2009)