MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related technology agreed upon by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) ( ISO/IEC JTC 1 /SC29/WG11) under the formal standard ISO/IEC 14496 – Coding of audio-visual objects . Uses of MPEG-4 include compression of audiovisual data for Internet video and CD distribution, voice ( telephone , videophone ) and broadcast television applications. The MPEG-4 standard was developed by a group led by Touradj Ebrahimi (later the JPEG president) and Fernando Pereira.
18-658: DMIF , or Delivery Multimedia Integration Framework , is a uniform interface between the application and the transport, that allows the MPEG-4 application developer to stop worrying about that transport. DMIF was defined in MPEG-4 Part 6 (ISO/IEC 14496-6) in 1999. DMIF defines two interfaces: the DAI (DMIF/Application Interface) and the DNI (DMIF-Network Interface). A single application can run on different transport layers when supported by
36-451: A song , for example. It was designed to standardize: The combination of MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 has been sometimes referred to as MPEG-47 . MPEG-7 is intended to complement the previous MPEG standards, by standardizing multimedia metadata -- information about the content, not the content itself. MPEG-7 can be used independently of the other MPEG standards - the description might even be attached to an analog movie. The representation that
54-453: A series of technologies for developers, for various service-providers and for end users: The MPEG-4 format can perform various functions, among which might be the following: MPEG-4 provides a large and rich set of tools for encoding. Subsets of the MPEG-4 tool sets have been provided for use in specific applications. These subsets, called 'Profiles', limit the size of the tool set a decoder
72-429: A specific set of capabilities to be defined in a manner appropriate for a subset of applications. Initially, MPEG-4 was aimed primarily at low- bit-rate video communications; however, its scope as a multimedia coding standard was later expanded. MPEG-4 is efficient across a variety of bit rates ranging from a few kilobits per second to tens of megabits per second. MPEG-4 provides the following functions: MPEG-4 provides
90-466: Is defined within MPEG-4, i.e. the representation of audio-visual data in terms of objects, is however very well suited to what will be built on the MPEG-7 standard. This representation is basic to the process of categorization. In addition, MPEG-7 descriptions could be used to improve the functionality of previous MPEG standards. With these tools, we can build an MPEG-7 Description and deploy it. According to
108-419: Is not required to allow interoperability. The MPEG-7 (ISO/IEC 15938) consists of different Parts. Each part covers a certain aspect of the whole specification. An MPEG-7 architecture requirement is that description must be separate from the audiovisual content . On the other hand, there must be a relation between the content and description . Thus the description is multiplexed with the content itself. On
126-571: Is required to implement. In order to restrict computational complexity, one or more 'Levels' are set for each Profile. A Profile and Level combination allows: MPEG-4 consists of several standards—termed "parts"—including the following (each part covers a certain aspect of the whole specification): Profiles are also defined within the individual "parts", so an implementation of a part is ordinarily not an implementation of an entire part. MPEG-1 , MPEG-2 , MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 are other suites of MPEG standards. MPEG-4 contains patented technologies,
144-490: The Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is a structured data equivalent of the terms of the MPEG-7 standard (MPEG-7Ontos, COMM, SWIntO, etc.). However, these mappings did not really bridge the " Semantic Gap ," because low-level video features alone are inadequate for representing video semantics. In other words, annotating an automatically extracted video feature, such as color distribution, does not provide
162-428: The x264 encoder, Nero Digital AVC, QuickTime 7, Flash Video , and high-definition video media like Blu-ray Disc ). Most of the features included in MPEG-4 are left to individual developers to decide whether or not to implement. This means that there are probably no complete implementations of the entire MPEG-4 set of standards. To deal with this, the standard includes the concept of "profiles" and "levels", allowing
180-440: The content itself, to allow fast and efficient searching for material that is of interest to the user. MPEG-7 is formally called Multimedia Content Description Interface . Thus, it is not a standard which deals with the actual encoding of moving pictures and audio, like MPEG-1 , MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 . It uses XML to store metadata , and can be attached to timecode in order to tag particular events, or synchronise lyrics to
198-473: The requirements document,1 "a Description consists of a Description Scheme (structure) and the set of Descriptor Values (instantiations) that describe the Data." A Descriptor Value is "an instantiation of a Descriptor for a given data set (or subset thereof)." The Descriptor is the syntactic and semantic definition of the content. Extraction algorithms are inside the scope of the standard because their standardization
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#1732790612242216-731: The right DMIF instantiation. MPEG-4 DMIF supports the following functionalities: DMIF expands upon the MPEG-2 DSM-CC standard (ISO/IEC 13818-6:1998) to enable the convergence of interactive, broadcast and conversational multimedia into one specification which will be applicable to set tops, desktops and mobile stations. The DSM-CC work was extended as part of the ISO/IEC 14496-6, with the DSM-CC Multimedia Integration Framework (DMIF) . DSM-CC stands for Digital Storage Media - Command and Control . DMIF
234-487: The right side you can see this relation between description and content. MPEG-7 uses the following tools: On the right side you can see the relation between MPEG-7 tools. There are many applications and application domains which will benefit from the MPEG-7 standard. A few application examples are: The MPEG-7 standard was originally written in XML Schema (XSD), which constitutes semi-structured data . For example,
252-539: The running time of a movie annotated using MPEG-7 in XML is machine-readable data , so software agents will know that the number expressing the running time is a positive integer, but such data is not machine-interpretable (cannot be understood by agents), because it does not convey semantics (meaning), known as the " Semantic Gap ." To address this issue, there were many attempts to map the MPEG-7 XML Schema to
270-561: The terms of that license for the patents listed. The majority of patents used for the MPEG-4 Visual format are held by three Japanese companies: Mitsubishi Electric (255 patents), Hitachi (206 patents), and Panasonic (200 patents). MPEG-7 MPEG-7 is a multimedia content description standard . It was standardized in ISO / IEC 15938 (Multimedia content description interface). This description will be associated with
288-513: The use of which requires licensing in countries that acknowledge software algorithm patents . Over two dozen companies claim to have patents covering MPEG-4. MPEG LA licenses patents required for MPEG-4 Part 2 Visual from a wide range of companies (audio is licensed separately) and lists all of its licensors and licensees on the site. New licenses for MPEG-4 System patents are under development and no new licenses are being offered while holders of its old MPEG-4 Systems license are still covered under
306-730: Was also a name of working group within Moving Picture Experts Group. The acronym "DSM-CC" was replaced by "Delivery" (Delivery Multimedia Integration Framework) in 1997. This technology-related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . MPEG-4 MPEG-4 absorbs many of the features of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 and other related standards, adding new features such as (extended) VRML support for 3D rendering, object-oriented composite files (including audio, video and VRML objects), support for externally specified digital rights management and various types of interactivity. AAC (Advanced Audio Coding)
324-547: Was standardized as an adjunct to MPEG-2 (as Part 1) before MPEG-4 was issued. MPEG-4 is still an evolving standard and is divided into a number of parts. Companies promoting MPEG-4 compatibility do not always clearly state which "part" level compatibility they are referring to. The key parts to be aware of are MPEG-4 Part 2 (including Advanced Simple Profile, used by codecs such as DivX , Xvid , Nero Digital , RealMedia , 3ivx , H.263 and by QuickTime 6) and MPEG-4 part 10 (MPEG-4 AVC/ H.264 or Advanced Video Coding, used by
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