What is MP4?

The official filename extension for MP4 is MPEG-4 Part 14. Generally, it contains digital video and digital audio streams defined by MPEG. This container format allows to combine different multimedia streams into one file.

What is MP4designed for?

The MPEG-4 file format specification was created on the basis of the QuickTime format specification published in 2001. This file format is created to contain timed media information in a flexible, extensible format in order to interchange, manage and edit multimedia.

Other file formats like MP4, 3GP, Motion JPEG 2000 are based on MP4.

What are MP4 special features?

• is based on MPEG and is identical to QuickTime container format
• streaming information is includes by using separate hint track
• stores other data (subtitles, images, object descriptors and scene descriptions)
• supports Initial Object Descriptors (IOD) and other MPEG features
• object-oriented file structure

What are MP4 advantages?

• allows streaming over the Internet
• creates the basis for developing other mobile media codecs included in “MP4 Family”
• supports high-quality audio
• can be simply decomposed into constituent objects
• flexible object structure depends directly on their type
• large hardware support

Where it can be applied?

MP4 is supported by modern mobile phones being a standart video format. There also exist MPEG-4 Part 14 Players for Windows (VLC Media Player, Media Player Classic, MPlayer), Mac (VLC Media Player for Mac, Real Player, MPlayer) and for Linux (Mplayer for Linux). As the most popular MPEG-4 implementations MP4 is the most supported format on hardware players (iPod, PSP, DVD-players).