MPEG (Leonardo
Chiariglione)
MPEG-4, established
as an ISO/IEC standard in early 1999, provides standards for streaming interactive multimedia.
More specifically, it aims to support production, distribution and content access for digital
television, interactive graphics, and interactive multimedia. It provides representations for
basic "media objects," which might be recorded or synthetic; it describes the composition of
compound media objects, or "scenes"; it provides for multiplexing and synchronizing of such data
for network transport; and it offers standards for interaction with the audiovisual scenes
generated at the receiver. MPEG-4's media objects include text, graphics, talking synthetic
heads and associated text, synthetic sounds, still images, video and audio elements. It supports
complex combination of these elements into time-varying scenes, and also provides for streaming
of the underlying data, and interaction with the receiver. Recently, MPEG-4 has been partly integrated with Apple's Quicktime file
format, using QuickTime as "the starting point for the development of a unified digital
media storage format for the MPEG-4 specification." How much of MPEG-4's ambitious program has
been fully defined or implemented remains unclear.