The IBM Toolkit for MPEG-4 consists of a set of technologies compliant with the MPEG-4 standard. It is implemented as Java classes and APIs, which can be used to develop MPEG-4 applications for authoring and playback. Since the toolkit is Java-based, applications are cross-platform, and will run on any platform where Java is supported.

The following three applications are provided as demonstration of this toolkit:

1. AVgen is a simple, easy-to-use GUI tool for creating audio/video-only content for ISMA- or 3GPP-compliant devices.

2. XMTBatch is a tool for creating rich MPEG-4 content beyond simple audio and video. Both AVgen and XMTBatch are based on the XMT standard (MPEG-4 in XML) technology.

3. M4Play is an MPEG-4 playback application.

Many more applications can be created using the toolkit. Those who experiment with the three included applications and are interested in creating their own applications can e-mail IBM alphaWorks about licensing.

The M4Play application can render the following file types:

MP4: ISMA-compliant
MP4: including MPEG-4 Systems
AVI: MPEG-4 Simple Profile video (such as Divx, Xvid) with MP3 audio.
MPEG-4 Simple Profile video (.cmp, .m4v, .263)
AAC Low-Complexity Profile audio (.aac, .adif, .adts)
MP3 MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 Layer 3 audio (.mp3)

...it will play DivX AVI's, real .mp4's, and the AAC files created by the new version of iTunes, if you change their extension from .m4a to .mp4 (but it won't play the DRM'ed AAC files from the iTunes Music Store).