Where is MPEG4????

[josel]

Hi all,
I have read that mpeg-4 was discontinued in 1999 due to a licience disagreement. Is this true or am i 7yrs behind the times. If it is out their can it be used for premiere pro 1.5 and encore? And what is the difference betwenn mpeg 2 and mpeg4?

Cheers Josel

[Soltaris]

MPEG-4 is alive and well. In fact they are used a lot in High-Definition material and is present in both the upcoming HD-DVD and Blue-Ray.

Two common varients are Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) and Advanced Video Codec (AVC). You should find a lot of information if you search on those.

Popular encoders include DivX, XviD, 3ivx, Nero Digital, x264, Sorenson AVC Pro, Mainconcept H.264 encoder, and others.

[Soltaris]

Apple Quicktime 7 supports MPEG-4 although it's really slow under Windows.

Microsoft Windows Media Video (WMV7/8/9) uses its own non-standard version of MPEG-4 Part 2.

To answer another of your questions, MPEG-4 Part 10 (or AVC) is capable of providing good video quality at bit rates less than half of what's required with MPEG-2. It's great at both low and high bitrates, and it's optimized for use over many different network structures.

More can be found out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC

[celtic_druid]

MPEG-4 specs also cover container, subtitles, audio (lossy and lossless), systems (menus and other interactive content), etc.

MPEG-4 is far from dead.

[garryheather]

Isn't the likes of DivX in some way related too... ?

[celtic_druid]

DivX as in the video codec is an implimentation of an ASP MPEG-4 Part 2 video codec. Minus the packed bitstream that is. The container, etc. have nothing to do with MPEG-4.

XviD is also an MPEG-4 Part 2 codec. That is why the two are compatible.