The Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard, jointly developed by the ITU-T and ISO/IEC SC29/WG11 (MPEG), offers not only increased coding efficiency and enhanced robustness, but also many features for the systems that use it. To enable the best visibility of, and access to, those features, and to enhance the opportunities for the interchange and interoperability of media, ISO/IEC 14496-15:2004 defines a storage format for video streams compressed using AVC.

ISO/IEC 14496-15:2004 specifies how Advanced Video Coding (AVC) streams are stored in file formats derived from ISO/IEC 14496-12 & 15444-12 (The ISO Base Media File Format). As a result, it therefore also defines how AVC streams are stored in ISO/IEC 14496-14 (The MP4 File Format).

ISO/IEC 14496-15:2004 can be used as a stand-alone specification, but it is normally expected that it will be used in the context of other standards using both the ISO Base Media File Format and AVC. ISO/IEC 14496-15:2004 enables but does not require the use of MPEG-4 systems structures.

In ISO/IEC 14496-15:2004 extensions to the ISO Base Media File Format are also defined, to support some of the new features offered by AVC. It is possible that these extensions will in the future be applied to a revision of the ISO Base Media File Format. Simple use of AVC is possible without using any of these structural extensions.

ISO/IEC 14496-15:2004 enables AVC video streams to:

• be used in conjunction with other media streams, such as audio;
• be formatted for delivery by a streaming server, using hint tracks;
• inherit all the use cases and features of the ISO Base Media File Format on which MP4 and MJ2 are based.