What Is MP4 and What Are the Differences Between It and MP3

It is one of the more common video file formats used for downloading and streaming videos from the Internet.

What Is MP4?

Therefore, MP4 is an international standard for audiovisual coding.

Then, this post fromMiniToolwill provide more information about it for you.

MPEG-4 Part 12 was originally created in 2001 and was based on the QuickTime file format (.MOV).

The current version (MPEG-4 Part 14) was released in 2003.

The standard specifies how to store data in the container itself, but not how the data is encoded.

Reducing the file size does not immediately affect the files quality.

Almost all original quality is preserved.

This makes MP4 a portable and web link-friendly video format.

Almost all video players support MP4 since MP4 is the standard file format for videos.

Windows and macOS users can play MP4 files.

Windows uses Windows Media Player by default; in macOS, theyre played using QuickTime.

It mainly focuses on 2 aspects the origin of the two files and the data key in they store.

MP3 is an abbreviation for Layer 3 of MPEG-1 Audio.

It is one of two formats considered for the MPEG audio standard in the early 1990s.

As for mp4, you might find the origin of it in the what is mp4 part.

In technical terms, mp3 is an audio coding format while mp4 is a digital multimedia container format.

MP3 uses lossy compression, which vastly reduces the size of an audio file while barely affecting its quality.

MP3 also allows you to balance the trade-off between audio quality and file size.

Furthermore, it will always be smaller than the equivalent mp4 file.

Therefore, mp4 files have no way to handle file encoding natively.

They rely on specific codecs to determine how to handle encoding and compression.

There are hundreds of codecs today, but not many codecs used with mainstream MP4 players.

Video MPEG-4 Part 10 (H.264) and MPEG-4 Part 2.

Subtitles MPEG-4 Timed Text.

Besides audio, MP4 files can also contain video, images, and text.

Youll often see various file extensions that give an indication of the jot down of data within the container.

Here are some of the most common:

MP4 The only official extension.

M4P Audio encrypted by FairPlay Digital Rights Management.

M4B Audiobooks and podcasts.

M4V MPEG-4 Visual bitstreams.

In addition, you might have a deeper understanding of mp3 vs mp4.