GPAC Project on Advanced Content
GPAC stands (does it ?) for GPAC Project on Advanced Content. It is an implementation of the MPEG-4 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, called Osmo4,
- A multimedia packager, called MP4Box,
- And some server tools (under development).
GPAC is cross-platform. It is written in (almost 100% ANSI) C for portability reasons (embedded platforms and DSPs), attempting to keep the memory footprint as low as possible. It is currently running under Windows, Linux, WindowsCE (SmartPhone, PocketPC 2002/2003), Embedded Linux (familiar 8, GPE) and recent SymbianOS systems.
The project is intended to 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 ENST as part of research work on digital media.
GPAC and Standards
GPAC officially started as an open-source project in 2003 with the initial goal to develop from scratch, in ANSI C, clean software compliant to the MPEG-4 Systems standard, a small and flexible alternative to the MPEG-4 reference software. GPAC can probably be seen as the most advanced and robust 2D MPEG-4 Player publicly available worldwide, as well as a decent 3D player.
In parallel, the project has evolved and now supports many other multimedia standards, with some good support for X3D, W3C SVG Tiny 1.2, and OMA/3GPP/ISMA features. 3D support is available on embedded platforms through OpenGL-ES.
People @ GPAC
The project is hosted at ENST (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications), leading French engineering school, located in Paris. Current main contributors of GPAC are:
- Jean Le Feuvre
- Cyril Concolato
Other (current or past) contributors from ENST are:
- Jean-Claude Moissinac
- Benoît Pellan
- Philippe de Cuetos
Additionally, GPAC is used at ENST for pedagogical purposes. Students regularly participate in the development of the project. The main students projects which have been contributed to GPAC are:
- Support for MPEG-2 transport stream (W. Ben Hania)
- DVB-H simulator (A.-V. Bui, X. Liu, Y. Qiu, H. Chi)
- Browser plugins for Mozilla (osmozilla), IE (GPAX) (Y. Xi, X. Zhao)
- Java integration (N. Nehme)
- Experimental voice controller based on HTK (L. Laisné)
- 3D add-ons (M. Chahid and B. Anglaret)
- Experimental authoring tool (J. Nitard)
- BIFS Broadcaster (E. Boustani, E. Ghevre)
GPAC is a project under constant evolution. We invite people, companies and universities interested in Rich Media around the world to have a look at GPAC and bring in valuable help and feedback.