MPEG-4 enables different software and hardware developers to generate multimedia objects possessing better abilities of adaptability and flexibility to improve the caliber of such services and technologies as digital television, animation graphics, the net and their extensions.

The MPEG-4 format provides owners having a lots of interaction with assorted animated objects. Standardized Digital Rights Management signaling, otherwise known from the MPEG community as Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP).

The MPEG-4 format is able to do various functions, among that happen to be the following: Multiplexes and synchronizes data, associated with media objects, in a way they can be efficiently transported further via network channels.

MPEG-4 is just about the latest (car stereo) compression method standardized by MPEG group, designed particularly for low-bandwidth (less than 1.5MBit/sec bitrate) video/audio encoding purposes. Likely the best-known MPEG-4 video encoders are called DivX and Xvid, which both of them are nowadays fully standard-compliant MPEG-4 encoders.

It noted that unlike MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, the MPEG-4's predecessors, MPEG-4 itself is not only one unified encoding mechanism, but alternatively friends name for several flavors of video and audio encoding methods that share certain same characteristics. These "flavors" in many cases are referred either as "layers" or "profiles" in MPEG-4 compression scheme with each new profile needs to be backwards compliant towards older, "lower" versions of MPEG-4 regarding playback capability. MPEG-4 group has standardized several new layers - most significant ones are h263+(currently in use widely in mobiles, named as 3GP) and H.264(often also called as AVC).