Stored File Format for MPEG-4 (Rev. 2.0)

A. Eleftheriadis, H. Kalva
Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University

A. Puri, R. Schmidt
AT&T Research

Contribution M2536, 40th MPEG Meeting, Stockholm, SE, July 1997

Introduction

The MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards specify bitstream representations for Audio, Video and Systems. Although they are intended to support interactivity, the flexibility they offer is rather limited. Among the reasons for these limitations is the lack of a stored file format defined by MPEG. Since MPEG-4 offers opportunities for much more flexibility in terms of types of audiovisual objects, editing of objects, composition of objects and user controlled presentation, it seems even more necessary to standardize a flexible and extensible file format. In other words, defining a standardized MPEG-4 file format will facilitate the following:

• Random Access to AV Objects
• Editing of AV Objects - insertion, deletion, modification
• Random Access to Composition Data
• Editing of Composition Data
• Unified representation of MPEG-1, MPEG-2: audio, video and systems data files, and coded MPEG-4 data

The proposed file format is portable and independent of the platform or the storage media used (e.g., DVD or hard disk or CD-ROM). The format specifies a way to segment and index encapsulated AV objects to help random access. All AV objects and BIFS information are encapsulated in adaptation layer (AL) PDUs.

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