Mpeg4 and Mp4 are the same thing? Find out the nuances

To date, it is impossible to imagine a single user of the Global Network, who would not encounter almost daily with multimedia content. The most attractive from the point of view of informativeness and usefulness among such information is the video. Television has already come to the foreground and, working or entertaining, the user increasingly draws his attention to video files from the Internet, a variety of formats which today exists a large number.

More often, downloading videos or movies from the Internet, the user has to deal with such types of files as Mpeg4 and Mp4 - this is the same thing, many believe. We'll figure it out, is it really so.

The main difference

In reality, the difference between MP4 and MPEG4 is and it is quite significant. The main difference is the fact that MPEG4 is the method by which compression of audio and video data is determined. And MP4 is a data store format. That is, MP4 is designed and used as a container in which audio and / or video data is stored. Thus, the statement that Mpeg4 and Mp4 are the same is somewhat incorrect. We will understand the purpose of each format.

MPEG-4

The main purpose of MPEG-4 is to use this method of compression in the air, interactive and colloquial environments. The application of the standard makes it possible to use audio and / or video content not only on a periodic basis. In addition, the standard greatly facilitates the integration of content consisting of two channels (audio and video) into one and the same multimedia scene. All this led to a wide distribution of the codec in television and web environments.

MP4

It can not be said that Mpeg4 and Mp4 are one and the same for another reason. MPEG-4 and MP4 are two terms that are easily confused with each other, not only because their names differ only in two letters, but also because they are very closely mingled in the world of a huge number of media files. The format of MPEG4 and MP4 as a container for data storage, widely spread not least due to the acceptable ratio of video quality and the size of the resulting files containing data.

With regard to this feature of MP4, we can say that the best ratio among other solutions between video quality and its size has led to the fact that MP4 has become one of the most common file formats for storing and transferring multimedia. MP4 is not only used on computers. It has gained immense popularity on several mobile platforms, smartphones, tablet computers, including "smart phones" and "tablets" from Apple.

On all the above-mentioned hardware solutions that allow you to receive, store and transfer multimedia content, MP4 is used as the default file format. Users who prefer direct and trouble-free reading, as well as recording video files, will always choose MP4, although they may not even know the container's differences from MPEG-4 and assume that Mpeg4 and Mp4 are the same. We can safely say that as a standard video format, MP4 is used almost everywhere, and MPEG-4 is a more specific solution.