GPAC Project on Advanced Content (GPAC, a
recursive acronym) is an implementation of the
MPEG-4
MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related tec ...
Systems standard written in
ANSI C. GPAC provides tools for
media playback, vector graphics and 3D
rendering, MPEG-4 authoring and distribution.
GPAC provides three sets of tools based on a core library called libgpac:
* A multimedia player, cross-platform command-line based ''MP4Client'' or with a GUI ''Osmo4''
* A multimedia packager, ''MP4Box''
* Some server tools, around multiplexing and streaming (under development).
GPAC is
cross-platform. It is written in (almost 100% ANSI)
C for portability reasons, attempting to keep the memory footprint as low as possible. It is currently running under
Windows,
Linux, Solaris,
Windows CE (SmartPhone, PocketPC 2002/2003), iOS, Android,
Embedded Linux (familiar 8, GPE) and recent
Symbian OS systems.
The project is intended for a wide audience ranging from end-users or content creators with development skills who want to experiment the new standards for interactive technologies or want to convert files for mobile devices, to developers who need players and/or server for multimedia streaming applications.
The GPAC framework is being developed at
École nationale supérieure des télécommunications
École may refer to:
* an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by Secondary education in France, secondary education establishments (collège and lycée)
* École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région ...
(ENST) as part of research work on digital media.
History and standards
GPAC was founded in
New York City in 1999. In 2003, it became an
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
project, with the initial goal of developing from scratch, in ANSI C, clean software compliant with the MPEG-4 Systems standard, as a small and flexible alternative to the MPEG-4 reference software.
In parallel, the project has evolved and now supports many other multimedia standards, with support for
X3D,
W3C SVG Tiny 1.2, and
OMA/
3GPP/
ISMA
''Isma'' is an Indomalayan genus of grass skippers in the family Hesperiidae.
Species
Listed alphabetically: and MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (
MPEG-DASH) features. 3D support is available on embedded platforms through
OpenGL
OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...
-ES. The MPEG-DASH feature can be used to reconstruct
.mp4
MPEG-4 Part 14 or MP4 is a digital multimedia container format most commonly used to store video and audio, but it can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images. Like most modern container formats, it allows streami ...
files from videos
streamed and
cached in this format (e.g.,
YouTube). Various research projects used or use GPAC.
Since 2013, GPAC Licensing has offered business support and closed-source licenses.
Multimedia content features
Packaging
GPAC features encoders and multiplexers, publishing and content distribution tools for MP4 files and many tools for scene descriptions (
BIFS/
VRML/
X3D converters, SWF/BIFS, SVG/BIFS, etc....). MP4Box provides all these tools in a single command-line application, albeit with extremely arcane syntax. Current supported features are:
* MP4/3GP Conversion from
MP3,
AVI
Avi is a given name, usually masculine, often a diminutive of Avram, Avraham, etc. It is sometimes feminine and a diminutive of the Hebrew spelling of Abigail.
People with the given name include:
* Avi (born 1937), Newbery award-winning Americ ...
, MPEG-2 TS, MPEG-PS,
AAC
AAC may refer to:
Aviation
* Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California
* Alaskan Air Command, a radar network
* American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New York
* American Aviation, a company from Cleveland, ...
,
H263,
H264,
AMR, and many others,
* 3GPP DIMS Packaging from
SVG tiny 1.2 files,
* File layout: fragmentation or interleaving, and cleaning,
* File hinting for
RTP/
RTSP and QTSS/DSS servers (MPEG-4/ISMA/3GP/ 3GP2 files),
* File splitting by size or time, extraction from file and file concatenation,
* XML information dumping for MP4 and
RTP hint tracks,
* Media Track extractions,
* ISMA E&A encryption and decryption,
* 3GPP timed text tools (SUB/SRT/TTXT/TeXML), VobSub import/export,
*
BIFS codec and scene conversion between MP4, BT and XMT-A,
*
LASeR codec and scene conversion between MP4, SAF, SVG and XSR (XML LASeR),
* XML scene statistics for
BIFS scene (BT, XMT-A and MP4),
* Conversion to and from BT, XMT-A, WRL, X3D and X3DV with support for gzip.
* A syntax that ensures that simple operations, i.e. concatenating 3 files into one new one, are not simple.
Playing
GPAC supports many protocols and standards, among which:
*
BIFS scenes (2D, 3D and mixed 2D/3D scenes),
*
VRML 2.0 (VRML97) scenes (without GEO or NURBS extensions),
*
X3D scenes (not complete) in X3D (
XML) and X3DV (VRML) formats,
*
SVG Tiny 1.2 scenes (including packaged in 3GP DIMS files),
*
LASeR and
SAF SAF, S.A.F or saf might refer to:
Companies
* SAF Tehnika, a producer of digital microwave data transmission equipment
* Strip Art Features, a comic book publishing house
* Svenska Automobilfabriken, a Swedish auto manufacturer
Computing
* Ser ...
(partial) support,
* Progressive loading/rendering of
SVG,
X3D and XMT files,
*
HTTP reading of all scene descriptions,
* GZIP supported for all textual formats of MPEG4/X3D/VRML/SVG,
* MP4 and 3GPP file reading (local & http),
* MP3 and
AAC
AAC may refer to:
Aviation
* Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California
* Alaskan Air Command, a radar network
* American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New York
* American Aviation, a company from Cleveland, ...
files (local & http) and HTTP streaming (
ShoutCast/
ICEcast radios),
* Most common media codecs for image, audio and video,
* Most common media containers,
* 3GPP Timed Text / MPEG-4 Streaming Text,
* MPEG-2 TS demultiplexer (local/
UDP/
RTP) with DVB support (Linux only),
* Streaming support through
RTP/RTCP (unicast and multicast) and RTSP/SDP,
* Plugins for Mozilla (''osmozilla'', Win32 and Linux) and Internet Explorer (''GPAX'', Win32 and PPC 2003).
Streaming
As of version 0.4.5, GPAC has some experimental server-side and streaming tools:
* MP4/3GP file
RTP streamer (unicast and multicast),
*
RTP streamer with service timeslicing (DVB-H) simulation,
* MPEG-2 TS broadcaster using MP4/3GP files or
RTP streams as inputs,
*
BIFS RTP broadcaster tool performing live encoding and RandomAccessPoints generation.
Contributors
The project is hosted at
ENST, a leading French engineering school also known as
Télécom Paris. Current main contributors of GPAC are:
* Jean Le Feuvre
* Cyril Concolato
* Romain Bouqueau
* JĂ©rĂ´me Gorin.
Other (current or past) contributors from ENST are:
* Pierre Souchay
* Jean-Claude Moissinac
* Jean-Claude Dufourd
* Benoit Pellan
* Philippe de Cuetos.
Additionally, GPAC is used at ENST for
pedagogical purposes. Students regularly participate in the development of the project.
References
External links
GPAC homepageat
Institut Mines-Télécom
Institut Mines-Télécom (IMT) is a French public academic institution dedicated to Higher Education and Research for Innovation in the fields of engineering and digital technology, organized as a Collegiate University. Created in 1996, it was ...
GPAC projecton
GitHub
*<
GPAC projecton
SourceForge (Deprecated 2016.01.23; See GitHub)
GPAC Licensing(business support)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gpac Project On Advanced Content
MPEG
Graphics standards
Scalable Vector Graphics
Cross-platform free software
Free software programmed in C
Free video conversion software
Free 3D graphics software