MPEG-Pro, an authoring system for MPEG-4

Authoring MPEG-4 content is quite a challenge. Far from the past one-video-plus-one-audio-streams of its predecessors MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 allows the content creator to compose together spatially and temporally large numbers of objects of different types (rectangular or shaped video, still image, natural audio, synthesized audio, 2D graphics and 3D). From this context, MPEG-Pro, an MPEG-4 authoring software prototype has been designed to integrate all main authoring capabilities from audio/visual encoding to the final delivery of a complete MPEG-4 application. The storage format, named MP4, has been defined for MPEG-4, but adapted techniques for specific delivery scenarios that are compliant with this format are still in course of proposition and definition. We introduce a solution to author and store MPEG-4 content with a better data accessibility for the streaming over RTP/IP scenario. By respecting scrupulously the MP4 constraints, this content remain reusable by any MPEG-4 compliant tool. We describe how its implementation is integrated in MPEG-Pro whose modular architecture allows a large scope of extensibility.