The full form of MPEG-4 is Moving Picture Experts Group Phase 4

MPEG-4 stands for “Moving Pictures Expert Group Phase 4,” a standard for audio and video coding compression. The method reduces the size of an audio or a video file while retaining its fidelity or quality.

MPEG-4 is commonly shortened to “MP4.” MP4 files can be read by computer applications such as QuickTime and VLC. It is also widely used on Blu-ray discs and DVDs.

Think of MPEG-4 as a user manual that tells audio and video recorders and editors how to compress files without making their quality suffer for faster online streaming or CD distribution.

MPEG-4 is one of the latest video/audio compression method standardized by MPEG group, designed specially for low-bandwidth (less than 1.5MBit/sec bitrate) video/audio encoding purposes.

MPEG-4 is designed to deliver DVD-quality video (MPEG-2) at lower data rates and smaller file sizes.

It should be noted that unlike MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, the MPEG-4’s predecessors, MPEG-4 itself isn’t just one unified encoding mechanism, but rather a group name for several flavors of video and audio encoding methods that share certain same characteristics. These “flavors” are often referred either as “profiles” or “layers” in MPEG-4 compression scheme and each new profile should be backwards compliant to the older, “lower” versions of MPEG-4 in terms of playback capability.