MPEG-4: basic coding

It all began in the early 1990s with the MPEG-1 standard, the aim of which was to enable audio and video to be recorded on digital media such as CD-ROMs, video CDs and CD-Is, at a reduced bitrate (1.15 Mbit/s for video) that would ultimately offer only mediocre quality. The MPEG-2 standard then made it possible to transmit and broadcast quality video and audio via satellite, cable or terrestrial networks for digital television, and to store and distribute them (media servers, DVD-Video). MPEG-2 also enables High Definition Television to be broadcast using High Level (HL), hence the absence of the MPEG-3 standard that was intended for this purpose. MPEG-4 is the standard, developed between July 1993 and 2002-2004, which meets the requirements of both interactive multimedia applications and rich media presentations through object-based coding. It is designed to be universal, encoding and representing any professional or consumer multimedia application for transmission to any user of any suitable equipment, via any network (figure 1 ).

This file [TE 5 365] and the following one is a detailed update of part of the "MPEG-1 to MPEG-4 compression" file. of February 2000. It is justified by the growing use of MPEG-4 tools in audio and video broadcasting and distribution, to Internet users, television viewers and cell phone users.

Many terms and the text of certain figures have been kept in English, to facilitate reading and use of the standard documents.

The abbreviations and acronyms used in this dossier are explained in more detail in . An "MPEG-4 glossary" proposed in defines the essential and non-explicit terms of this text.