Sustainability of Digital Formats
Planning for Library of Congress Collections
Sustainability of Digital Formats
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| Introduction | Sustainability Factors | Content Categories | Format Descriptions | Contact | |
| Full name | ISO/IEC 14496-1:2001. Information technology -- Coding of audio-visual objects -- Part 1: Systems (formal name) MPEG-4 file format, version 1 (common name) |
| Description | The first MPEG-4 file format developed by the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG). The format's object-based design defines a set of tools that present binary coded representation of individual audiovisual objects, text, graphics, and synthetic objects. (See Notes below.) This format was intended to serve web and other online applications and mobile devices, i.e., cell phones and PDAs. See also Notes for MP4_FF_2. As indicated in the Adoption information under Sustainability factors below, MP4_FF_1 is not widely used. For this reason the set of subtypes for files containing the various profiles of MPEG-4_V (MPEG-4 Visual Coding, Part 2 of the standard) have not been developed at this Web site. In addition, it appears that MP4_FF_1 could contain MPEG-4_AVC (MPEG-4 Advanced Visual Coding, Part 10 of the standard), but this is judged unlikely and the possibility has not been documented at this Web site. |
| Production phase | Generally a final-state (end-user delivery) format. |
| Relationship to other formats | |
| Has subtype | MPEG-4 File Format, Version 1, with Visual Encoding (Part 2), Various Profiles, not documented at this time |
| Contains | MPEG-4_V, MPEG-4 Visual Coding (Part 2), All Profiles/Subtypes |
| Has later version | MP4_FF_2, MPEG-4 File Format, Version 2 |
| LC experience or existing holdings | |
| LC preference |
| Disclosure | Open standard. Developed by ISO technical program JTC 1/SC 29 (WG11), aka the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG), Coding of audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information. See http://www.iso.org/iso/en/stdsdevelopment/techprog/workprog/ TechnicalProgrammeSCDetailPage.TechnicalProgrammeSCDetail?COMMID=148. |
| Documentation | ISO/IEC 14496-1:2001. Information technology -- Coding of audio-visual objects -- Part 1: Systems. (Superceded by the 2004 edition.) See complete list of ISO/IEC MPEG-4 documents in the description of MP4_FF_2. |
| Adoption | Of the four file formats associated with the MPEG-4 family of specifications, the compiler of this document believes that most current production systems have implemented MP4_FF_2. In the 2004 edition of Part 1 of the standard, the section that had been devoted to version one of the MPEG-4 file format in the 2001 edition (Section 13) has been omitted. |
| Licensing and patent claims | See MP4_FF_2 |
| Transparency | See MP4_FF_2 |
| Self-documentation | See MP4_FF_2 |
| External dependencies | See MP4_FF_2 |
| Technical protection considerations | See MP4_FF_2 |
| Video elements | |
| Normal rendering for video | See MP4_FF_2 |
| Clarity (support for high image resolution) | See MP4_FF_2 |
| Functionality beyond normal video rendering | See MP4_FF_2 |
| Sound elements | |
| Fidelity (support for high audio resolution) | See MP4_FF_2 |
| Support for multiple sound channels | See MP4_FF_2 |
| Functionality beyond normal rendering for sound | Not investigated at this time. |
| Tag type | Value | Note |
| Filename Extension | mp4 | |
| Internet Media Type | video/mp4 | Most frequently cited MIME type; for more information see MP4_FF_2. The compiler of this document welcomes comments on the use of MIME types for various MPEG-4 file formats. |
| Magic numbers | None | |
| File type brand | mp41 | ISO_BMFF includes a file type box that contains major and minor brands (identifiers); the mp41 brand is specified in Part 14, Section 4 (ISO/IEC 14496-14:2003. Information technology -- Coding of audio-visual objects -- Part 14: MP4 File Format, p. 6). |
| General | The four file formats associated with the ISO/IEC 14496 family of specifications are: • MP4_FF_1, "version 1," this document, from Part 1 (2001) • MP4_FF_2, "version 2," from Part 14 • MP4_FF_AVCE, for Advanced Video Coding extensions, from Part 15 • MP4_XMT, "textual format," from Part 11 MP4_FF_1 and MP4_FF_2 are very similar. For a brief statment concerning MPEG-4's object-based design, see Notes for MP4_FF_2. Note that "object-oriented building blocks" in this file format and in QuickTime are called atoms; in contrast, they are called boxes in the later ISO_BMFF and MP4_FF_2. |
| History | MP4_FF_1 was defined in the 2001 edition of Part 1 of the MPEG-4 standard and has now been superceded by MP4_FF_2. Both file formats owe a debt to their predecessor QuickTime. This lineage is shared with ISO_BMFF, defined in MPEG-4 Part 12 (and also in Part 12 of the JPEG 2000 standard), which is in turn the supertype for MP4_FF_2, defined in Part 14, and for MP4_FF_AVCE, defined in Part 15. |
URLs
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• ISO/IEC 14496-1:2001. Information technology -- Coding of audio-visual objects -- Part 1: Systems. (Superceded by the 2004 edition.)
URLs
• MIME Type Registration for MPEG-4 by Y Lim (net&tv) and D. Singer (Apple Computer), March 2006 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4337)
• RFC 3640: RTP Payload Format for Transport of MPEG-4 Elementary Streams (http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3640.txt) from the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force, http://www.ietf.org/)
• RFC 3016: RTP Payload Format for MPEG-4 Audio/Visual Streams (http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc?rfc=3016) from the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force, http://www.ietf.org/)
See also references in MP4_FF_2
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