The era of mp4 is coming. The most popular word online is no longer mp3 but mp4. You can never imagine how fast the computer technology move forward. While most people enjoy the benefits they bring. Few really understand them and are less likely to use them to their full potentials.

What is MP4 anyway?

MP4, abbreviation of MPEG-4, is a compressed video and audio format. MP4 files was created due to the joint effort of a large number of researchers focused on reducing the size of large, cumbersome music and video files into smaller ones to provide more disk space. Like mp3 player - a symbol referring to the music playing device, mp4 player literally means the device playing both movie and music. Thus, it is not difficult to conclude that ipod is falling into this category of personal multi-media device. MP4 has been hailed as the prevailing music and video file in the market today. The iPod itself encourages the use of the MP4 files for video and music.

An mp4 player plays movie, but not limited to MP4 movies.

Singly form the advertised mp4 player, one can only get that this thing can play movie. The truth is that there are numerous movie formats existing in the market, enough to confuse every one. Most mp4 players play MP4, 3PG and AVI which are widely used in other electronics like cell phone. Among all these, MP4 is the most advanced formats, which has the same high quality as VOB, but the smallest file size compared to other formats. On the flip side, some old mp4 player versions, which only support WMV movie, should not be called mp4 player.

Download movie and convert them.

So I know what a mp4 player can do, is adding movie to my player as simple as download and then drag-and-drop? Not exactly. Some movie formats popular on the web are not compatible with your mp4 player, like MPEG, DVD,RMVB,RM. You need to convert them with the formats convert software included with the player. As long as the industry still not reach one solution, this issue will remain. The download of movie is not cost-free. All "free" website require a minimal member fee, no matter it is legal or illegal. The only free way I know is the P2P (peer to peer) sites where people share interests together. Even you have downloaded movies you like, there is one final step to take. Since every MP4 player has its own screen resolution, you have to set the output file size in accordance with the specified resolution before the convert process. Your mp4 player can't handle large-resolution movie, even it is in the right format.

Hard drive or flash memory based player

There are two types of storage media adopted by mp4 player, hard drive and flash memory. The former is first used by ipod to produce large capacity players. As technology improved, large capacity flash memory comes into reality and is stable. Hard drive is relatively cheaper than flash memory, but slower in the reading speed. Because there are no movable parts, a flash based player is considered more drop-resistant than a hard drive based one.