A Comparison of Digital Video Standards - Digital Video and Audio Broadcasting Technology - page 171

• A fixed colored background which may be patterned

• An MPEG-4 coded moving picture in a fixed frame

• A synthetic figure which moves three-dimensionally in syn-

chronism with the video, e.g. a synthetic person which “mimes”
the sound in gestures (deaf-and-dumb alphabet)

• Stop, start, pause, forward and rewind buttons (interactive ele-

ments)

• Accompanying text

• MPEG-coded audio signal

The development of MPEG-4 was continued with respect to the video
and audio coding, adopting and refining the methods known from MPEG-1
and MPEG-2 instead of looking for a wholly new approach. The only new
thing is that MPEG-4 can also cope with synthetic visual and audiovisual
elements such as synthetic sound. MPEG-4 objects can be present as PES
stream both within an MPEG-2 transport stream and as an MPEG-4 file.
MPEG-4 can also be transmitted as a program stream in IP packets.
MPEG-4 applications can be typically employed in

•

The Internet

• Interactive multimedia applications on the PC

• New video compression applications with greater compression

factors as required, e.g. for HDTV

MPEG-4 was made into a standard in 1999. At the beginning of the new
millenium, a further new video compression standard H.264 was devel-
oped and standardized. Compared with MPEG-2, this method is more ef-
fective by a factor of 2 to 3 and thus allows data rates which are lower by a
factor of 2 to 3, often even with improved picture quality. The relevant
standard is ITU-T H.264. H.264 has also been incorporated in the group of
MPEG-4 standards as MPEG-4 Part 10.
The most important standard documents covered by the heading MPEG-
4 are:

• MPEG-4 Part 1 - Systems, ISO/IEC 14496-1

• MPEG-4 Part 2 - Video Encoding, ISO/IEC 14496-2

•

MPEG-4 Part 3 - Audio Encoding, ISO/IEC 14996-3

• MPEG-4 Part 10 - H.264 Advanced Video Coding. ISO/IEC

14496-10