Explains the latest moving picture experts group (MPEG) standard for interactive multimedia, MPEG-4. The 16 chapters are divided into two sections that describe the technologies associated with the layers below the audiovisual coding layer, and the coding tools that generate compressed audio and visual streams. The major topics are the synchronization of streams in an MPEG-4 presentation, BIFS for scene description, the MPEG-Java architecture, the extensible MPEG-4 textual format, video coding of rectangular and shaped objects, synthetic- natural hybrid coding, speech coding, and testing for validation