Creating Interactive Video With MPEG4:
"MPEG4 is finally starting to gain some traction. The allure of platform and vendor independence and ubiquitous players on all kinds of devices is strong. But in many areas, MPEG4 is still a 'bleeding-edge' technology. You'll quickly feel the pain when you try to do any but the most basic audio/video delivery using it. Today, all the major streaming players support MPEG4, mostly through the EnvivioTV plugin. And Apple's Quicktime lets you convert all kinds of movies to MPEG4 using the best-$30-you-ever-spent-on-software Quicktime Pro. But to really unlock the promise of MPEG4 – universal and reliable authoring and playback of complex interactive multimedia – you still have to go out on the edge."

Profiles and Compatibility
MPEG4 is designed to be useful for video playback across a wide variety of devices, from cell phones to powerful desktop computers; from pocket sized handhelds to TV set top boxes. To support this flexibility, the spec is divided into different profiles and levels, each defining a subset of MPEG4's total feature set. An MPEG player will support a particular profile by implementing all of that profile's features. IBM's SamplesForMPEG4 (also available at alphaWorks) includes dozens of examples of varied XMT and MPEG4 features. Many of these play in the QT and Real players, while others do not. (Of course, they all play in IBM's M4Play, part of the Toolkit.)

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