DVD Knowledge Base 18 - How does MPEG-4 affect DVD?

MPEG-4 is a video encoding standard designed primarily for low-data rate streaming video, although it's actually more efficient than MPEG-2 at DVD and HDTV data rates. MPEG-4 also provides for advanced multimedia with media objects, but most implementations only support simple video (Simple Visual Profile). There's also MPEG-4 part 10, also known as H.264 (and also known as JVT or AVC), which is an even better video encoding standard.

DVD uses MPEG-2 video encoding. Standard DVD players don't recognize the MPEG-4 video format. MPEG-4 files can be stored on DVD-ROM for use on computers. For example, DivX uses MPEG-4.

It's possible that MPEG-4 or H.264 will be used in a future, high-definition version of DVD. In any case, it will probably not appear before 2005 at the earliest.

For more about MPEG, see Tristan's MPEG.org site and the MPEG home page.