The ISO Base Media File Format is designed to contain timed media information for a presentation in a
flexible, extensible format that facilitates interchange, management, editing, and presentation of the media.
This presentation may be ‘local’ to the system containing the presentation, or may be via a network or other
stream delivery mechanism.
The file structure is object-oriented; a file can be decomposed into constituent objects very simply, and the
structure of the objects inferred directly from their type.
The file format is designed to be independent of any particular network protocol while enabling efficient
support for them in general.
The ISO Base Media File Format is a base format for media file formats.
It is intended that the ISO Base Media File Format shall be jointly maintained by WG1 and WG11.
Consequently, a subdivision of work created ISO/IEC 15444-12 and ISO/IEC 14496-12 in order to document
the ISO Base Media File Format and to facilitate the joint maintenance.
This technically identical text is published as ISO/IEC 14496-12 for MPEG-4, and as ISO/IEC 15444-12 for
JPEG 2000, and reference to this specification should be made accordingly. The recommendation is to
reference one, for example ISO/IEC 14496-12, and append to the reference a parenthetical comment
identifying the other, for example “(technically identical to ISO/IEC 15444-12)”.