Tagged Image File Format. It was developed by Aldus, the original people behind Pagemaker. The 'tags' in question were intended to let the files support various formatting options, but very few people made use of them and it's mostly used for simple uncompressed raster images. (There's an option in Photoshop to compress them using the LZW algorithm but some page layout programs won't utilize them properly in that format.)

On Jul 4, 2009, at 4:33 PM, Marta Edie wrote:

Lee, I am late in answering, but I seem to be always late. God will probably have to postpone my death . But I did want to thank you for this interesting piece of email. Motion Picture Experts Group. Who would have thought! My thoughts did not get farther than a peg with an M on top!!!!. I did print this out, it is amazing. Thanks so much. Now I can shine to my friends who have ONLY Dells.

I now begin to wonder what TIFF stands for.

Thanks again for that thorough explanation
Marta

On Jun 28, 2009, at 19:38 PM, Lee Larson wrote:

On Jun 28, 2009, at 6:00 PM, Marta Edie asked:

And one questions begets another: what is the difference between mp4 and mp3 . Methinks that somehow i cannot send files easily when they are in mp4.

There's a computer industry committee, formed in the late 1980s called the Motion Picture Experts Group (a.k.a. MPEG). Their job is to define standards for compressing and encoding sound and video for playback on computers. They've come out with a series of definitions called the MPEG standards.

Their first set of standards is called MPEG-1 and came out in the early 1990s. The ubiquitous mp3 sound files are technically MPEG-1 Level 3 sound files.

In the late 1990s, their fourth revision was issued and was called (big drum roll!) MPEG-4. The mp4 sound files are one type of sound file under the MPEG-4 umbrella. I think the mp4 and m4a files are the same, and Apple seems to use both extensions. Apple uses m4b when the mp4 files are bookmarked, such as with audio books and some podcasts.

In theory, mp4 files should be playable on any platform, as long as modern software is installed. Problems arise because mp4 is really a container format rather than a sound format. This means that there are several different ways to encode and compress the data contained therein. These different methods are called codecs. Not all developers choose to support all the standard codecs.

It is an interesting tidbit that the MPEG-4 specifications were largely based on Apple's QuickTime and Apple holds several important patents for ideas used in MPEG-4.






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