Client Questions: What is MPEG4?

Definition of MP4 and MPEG-4

We have many clients who wish to understand the difference between MP4 and MPEG-4. To put it simply; MPEG-4 stands for “Moving Pictures Expert Group 4,” a standard for audio and video coding compression. The method reduces the size of an audio or a video file while retaining its fidelity or quality.

This large format is great for editing videos or viewing on a larger screen. MP4s are a universal file format compatible with most streaming platforms and their compressed nature makes them smaller and easier to handle. To share videos, it's often necessary to convert from an MOV to an MP4.

To figure out the difference between MP4 and MPEG-4, we have to understand two basic terms first: video codec and media container. It can be shown with the following formula:

Media Container = video format (video codec) + audio format (audio codec) + subtitle + chapter-information + meta-data

Then, we will go through the definition of MP4 and MPEG-4.

What is MPEG-4

MPEG-4 is a method of defining compression of audio and visual digital data (Audio/Visual Objects). With the development of MPEG-4, it is divided into a number of parts (each part covers a certain aspect of the whole specification) including MPEG-4 part 2 (e.g. XviD video codec), MPEG-4 part 3 (e.g. AAC audio codec), MPEG-4 part 10 (H.264 video codec), MPEG-4 part 14 (MP4 media container) and others.

MPEG-4 is a complex thing that includes knowledge in various aspects. To know more further, go to Wikipedia: MPEG-4.

What is MP4

MP4 is an abbreviated term for MPEG-4 part 14. MPEG-4 part 14 is one of the parts of the MPEG-4 compressing algorithm. It is a digital multimedia format (container format) that used to store video, audio, images and such like data. That is to say, MP4 can be a video file extension (.mp4), as well as a container format.

The only official file extension of MPEG-4 part 14 is .mp4. But it also has other file extensions such as .m4v, .m4p, .m4b and m4a. You can refer to this page to know more about these MPEG-4 Part 14 filename extensions.

#MP4 vs MPEG-4: The Differences between MP4 and MPEG-4

MP4: It can be a file extension, a video format, and a media container.

MPEG-4: It's a compression method of the MPEG group, specially designed for low-bandwidth (less than 1.5MBit/sec bitrate) video/audio encoding purposes.

MP4 is one of the media container formats for MPEG-4. Except for it, videos encoded in MPEG-4 also has other media container formats like Matroska (MKV), AVI, MXF, OGG and QuickTime (MOV).

Now, let's see some examples to make the relationship more intuitive.

MP4 (.mp4) = MPEG-4 video codec (H.264/XviD) + MPEG-4 audio codec (AAC)

MP4 (.mp4) = MPEG-H video codec (H.265) + Dolby Digital audio codec (AC3)

AVI (.avi) = MPEG-4 video codec (H.264/DivX) + MPEG-2 audio codec (MP3)

To Sum Up

MP4 is not necessarily encoded by MPEG-4 video and audio. MPEG-4 video and audio encoding are not necessarily to be packaged in MP4 container. They can also be packaged into other containers such as AVI, MKV, etc.

The Repair Shop - How To Spot A Ferrotype Camera 1855-1940s

After watching The Repair Shop on BBC1 restore a beautiful and rather rare ferrotype camera I thought a blog on the process would be interesting. Not only did they repair but they managed to have the camera working, taking photographs. This was very inspirational given the age of the camera. ABOUT FERROTYPE PROCESS Ferrotypes first appeared in America in the 1850s, but didn’t become popular in Britain until the 1870s. They were still being made by while-you-wait street photographers as late as the 1950s. The ferrotype process was a variation of the collodion positive, and used a similar process to wet plate photography . A very underexposed negative image was produced on a thin iron plate. It was blackened by painting, lacquering or enamelling, and coated with a collodion photographic emulsion. The dark background gave the resulting image the appearance of a positive. Unlike collodion positives, ferrotypes did not need mounting in a case to produce a positi...

Preserving Family Memories - caring for your heritage

Memories are an important part of all our lives. Old letters, photographs, scrapbooks, slides and negatives, glass plates, cine film, audio-visual tapes and many other things help us to recall our past and the history of our family and communities. All of these things, however, are subject to decay and eventual destruction if they are not cared for properly. Oxford Duplication Centre in Kidlington can support all our clients with digitisation of all consumers, corporate and heritage scanning and digitisation. Please do email cheryl@oxfordduplicationcentre.com or contact us 01865 457000 to discuss your project. Letters, Diaries, Books and Documents. Many families preserve letters, diaries, or other written documents in which family members discuss their life and times. World War II remembrances have led many families to look for a relative's carefully stored letters. Other families have saved newspaper clippings of important family events, such as the announcemen...

Onion Skin Archive Book Scanning - What is this and how do we process the pages?

CURRENT BOOK SCANNNING PROJECT. We are currently working on a very large archive of old books that require HQ scanning to Archival TIFF images. Once processed, these images will be prepared to PDF with OCR (optical character recognition) for a complete searchable output. The difficulty in this order, is the books are prepared using a medium called Onion Skin Paper. Whilst we are very confident in preparing this type of medium, it is very important to be aware that there are risks with scanning, given the sometimes-fragile nature of the paper. Tears and rips can occur, so a very gentle white glove approach is required. Equally, with the nature of onion skin, the paper is very translucent which requires a sheet of white paper to be placed under each page before scanning. This then grants a very good HQ image that we can work with. WHAT IS ONION SKIN PAPER? Onion skin paper is a type of very light weight, almost translucent paper that ...

Oxford Duplication Centre Ltd

Search This Blog