gpac 0.4.2 review

GPAC is an implementation of the MPEG-4 Systems standard (ISO/IEC 14496-1) developed from scratch in ANSI C. The main development

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Jean Le Feuvre

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GPAC is an implementation of the MPEG-4 Systems standard (ISO/IEC 14496-1) developed from scratch in ANSI C.

The main development goal is to provide a clean (a.k.a. readable by as many people as possible), small and flexible alternative to the MPEG-4 Systems reference software (known as IM1 and distributed in ISO/IEC 14496-5). The MPEG-4 Reference software is indeed a very large piece of software, designed to verify the standard rather than provide a small, production-stable software.
GPAC is written in ANSI C for portability reasons (embedded platforms and DSPs) with a simple goal: keep the memory footprint as low as possible.

The second development goal is to achieve integration of recent multimedia standards (SVG/SMIL, VRML, X3D, SWF, etc) into a single framework. This stage is still under drafting but has started with VRML97 support.
GPAC already features 2D and 3D multimedia playback, MPEG-4 Systems encoders/multiplexers and publishing tools for content distribution.

GPAC is licensed under the GNU General Public License (see FAQ).

The current GPAC release (0.2.3) already covers a very large part of the standard, and features what can probably be seen as the most advanced and robust 2D MPEG-4 Player available worldwide, as well as a decent 3D MPEG-4/VRML player with some X3D support.

GPAC is currently running under Windows, Linux platforms - WindowsCE/PocketPC platform is not actively maintained but GPAC 0.2.3 is running on an iPaq device.

Here are some key features of "gpac":
MP4 and 3GPP file reading, both local and through http download (QuickTime FastStart).
MP3 (local and http) and ShoutCast.
AAC file reading and AAC http streaming (needs latest faad2 cvs tarball).
Media Codecs: MPEG-4 Visual Simple Profile, MPEG-4 Audio AAC, JPEG, PNG, AMR audio and all codecs supported by the FFMPEG library (including AVC/H264).
All media containers supported by the FFMPEG library: avi, mpeg, vob, etc...
Xiph.org Media: Ogg file format (including http read and Icecast), Vorbis audio and Theora video.
3GPP Timed Text / MPEG-4 Streaming Text.
Streaming support: RTP and RTSP/SDP for MPEG-4 Visual/Audio, MPEG-1/2 audio and video, 3GPP timed text, AMR audio and H263 video.
Multichannel audio, multichannel to stereo mapper.
MPEG-4 scenes (2D, 3D and mixed 2D/3D scenes) - read from binary format (BIFS) and textual format (BT/XMT-A).
VRML 2.0 (VRML97) scenes (without GEO or NURBS extensions).
X3D scenes (not complete) - supports both X3D (XML format) and X3DV (VRML format).
JavaScript support for MPEG4/X3D/VRML.
Compressed description (GZip) supported for all textual formats of MPEG4/X3D/VRML.
Simple SVG scenes (not complete).
Simple SWF (Macromedia Flash) scenes (no ActionScript, no clipping, etc).
HTTP reading of all scene descriptions.