The Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard, jointly developed by the ITU-T and ISO/IEC SC29/WG11
(MPEG), offers not only increased coding efficiency and enhanced robustness, but also many features for the
systems that use it. To enable the best visibility of, and access to, those features, and to enhance the
opportunities for the interchange and interoperability of media, this part of ISO/IEC 14496 defines a storage
format for video streams compressed using AVC.
This part of ISO/IEC 14496 defines a storage format based on, and compatible with, the ISO Base Media File
Format (ISO/IEC 14496-12 and ISO/IEC 15444-12), which is used by the MP4 file format (ISO/IEC 14496-14)
and the Motion JPEG 2000 file format (ISO/IEC 15444-3) among others. This part of ISO/IEC 14496 enables
AVC video streams t
???? be used in conjunction with other media streams, such as audio;
???? be used in an MPEG-4 systems environment, if desired;
???? be formatted for delivery by a streaming server, using hint tracks;
???? inherit all the use cases and features of the ISO Base Media File Format on which MP4 and MJ2 are
based.
This part of ISO/IEC 14496 may be used as a standalone specification; it specifies how AVC content shall be
stored in an ISO Base Media File Format compliant format. However, it is normally used in the context of a
specification, such as the MP4 file format, derived from the ISO Base Media File Format, that permits the use
of AVC video.
The ISO Base Media File Format is becoming increasingly common as a general-purpose media container
format for the exchange of digital media, and its use in this context should accelerate both adoption and
interoperability.
Extensions to the ISO Base Media File Format are defined here to support the new systems aspects of the
AVC codec.