SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR GENERATION AND INTERFACING OF BITSTREAMS REPRESENTING MPEG-CODED AUDIOVISUAL OBJECTS

The invention provides a standardized interface facility for MPEG-4 authoring, bitstream manipulation, editing and interpretation, with associated tools and interfaces to, resulting in coded bitstreams which are easier to test, check and debug while conforming to the MPEG-4 standard. The specified interfaces can also facilitate graceful degradation in the face of decreased resources by allowing editing of bitstreams. The specified interfaces can also allow creation of decodable bitstreams in response to the user requests either directly or indirectly embedded in audiovisual applications, as well as future services. The invention specifies a bitstream input/output package in the Java programming language to facilitates bitstream encoding and decoding of audio-visual media objects, especially when coding uses the MPEG-4 standard. The invention separates fixed length and variable length coding, and allows flexible parsing which offers the potential of optimized implementation as needed to aid real-time or near real-time operation.