3GP
Encyclopedia
3GP is a multimedia
container format defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)
for 3G
UMTS multimedia services. It is used on 3G mobile phone
s but can also be played on some 2G
and 4G
phones.
3G2 (3GPP2 file format) is a multimedia container format defined by the 3GPP2 for 3G CDMA2000
multimedia services. It is very similar to the 3GP file format, but has some extensions and limitations in comparison to 3GP.
technical specification. 3GP is a required file format for video and associated speech/audio media types and timed text in ETSI 3GPP technical specifications for IP Multimedia Subsystem
(IMS), Multimedia Messaging Service
(MMS), Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service
(MBMS) and Transparent end-to-end Packet-switched Streaming Service (PSS).
3G2 is defined in the 3GPP2 technical specification.
defined in ISO/IEC
14496-12 - MPEG-4
Part 12, but older versions of the 3GP file format did not use some of its features. 3GP and 3G2 are container formats similar to MPEG-4 Part 14
(MP4), which is also based on MPEG-4 Part 12. The 3GP and 3G2 file format were designed to decrease storage and bandwidth requirements in order to accommodate mobile phone
s.
3GP and 3G2 are similar standards, but with some differences:
Some cell phones use the .mp4 extension for 3GP video.
or H.263
or MPEG-4 Part 10 (AVC/H.264), and audio streams as AMR-NB
, AMR-WB
, AMR-WB+
, AAC-LC
, HE-AAC
v1 or Enhanced aacPlus (HE-AAC v2). 3GPP allowed use of AMR and H.263 codecs in the ISO base media file format (MPEG-4 Part 12), because 3GPP specified the usage of the Sample Entry and template fields in the ISO base media file format as well as defining new boxes to which codecs refer. These extensions were registered by the registration authority for code-points in ISO base media file format ("MP4 Family" files).
For the storage of MPEG-4 media specific information in 3GP files, the 3GP specification refers to MP4 and the AVC
file format, which are also based on the ISO base media file format. The MP4 and the AVC file format specifications described usage of MPEG-4 content in the ISO base media file format.
A 3GP file is always big-endian
, storing and transferring the most significant bytes first.
, EVRC-B
, EVRC-WB, 13K (QCELP
), SMV
or VMR-WB
, which was specified by 3GPP2 for use in ISO base media file format. The 3G2 specification also defined some enhancements to 3GPP Timed Text. 3G2 file format does not store Enhanced aacPlus (HE-AAC v2) and AMR-WB+ audio streams. For the storage of MPEG-4 media (AAC audio, MPEG-4 Part 2 video, MPEG-4 Part 10 - H.264/AVC) in 3G2 files, the 3G2 specification refers to the MP4 file format and the AVC file format specification, which described usage of this content in the ISO base media file format. For the storage of H.263 and AMR content 3G2 specification refers to the 3GP file format specification.
, Mac, and Windows
platforms with MPlayer
and VLC media player
. Programs such as Media Player Classic
, K-Multimedia Player
, Totem
, RealPlayer
, QuickTime
, and GOM Player
can also be used.
3GP files can be encoded and decoded with open source software FFmpeg
.
Multimedia
Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...
container format defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)
3GPP
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project is a collaboration between groups of telecommunications associations, known as the Organizational Partners...
for 3G
3G
3G or 3rd generation mobile telecommunications is a generation of standards for mobile phones and mobile telecommunication services fulfilling the International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 specifications by the International Telecommunication Union...
UMTS multimedia services. It is used on 3G mobile phone
Mobile phone
A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...
s but can also be played on some 2G
2G
2G is short for second-generation wireless telephone technology. Second generation 2G cellular telecom networks were commercially launched on the GSM standard in Finland by Radiolinja in 1991...
and 4G
4G
In telecommunications, 4G is the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards. It is a successor to the 3G and 2G families of standards. In 2009, the ITU-R organization specified the IMT-Advanced requirements for 4G standards, setting peak speed requirements for 4G service at 100 Mbit/s...
phones.
3G2 (3GPP2 file format) is a multimedia container format defined by the 3GPP2 for 3G CDMA2000
CDMA2000
CDMA2000 is a family of 3G mobile technology standards, which use CDMA channel access, to send voice, data, and signaling data between mobile phones and cell sites. The set of standards includes: CDMA2000 1X, CDMA2000 EV-DO Rev. 0, CDMA2000 EV-DO Rev. A, and CDMA2000 EV-DO Rev. B...
multimedia services. It is very similar to the 3GP file format, but has some extensions and limitations in comparison to 3GP.
Specifications
3GP is defined in the ETSI 3GPP3GPP
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project is a collaboration between groups of telecommunications associations, known as the Organizational Partners...
technical specification. 3GP is a required file format for video and associated speech/audio media types and timed text in ETSI 3GPP technical specifications for IP Multimedia Subsystem
IP Multimedia Subsystem
The IP Multimedia Subsystem or IP Multimedia Core Network Subsystem is an architectural framework for delivering Internet Protocol multimedia services. It was originally designed by the wireless standards body 3rd Generation Partnership Project , as a part of the vision for evolving mobile...
(IMS), Multimedia Messaging Service
Multimedia Messaging Service
Multimedia Messaging Service, or MMS, is a standard way to send messages that include multimedia content to and from mobile phones. It extends the core SMS capability that allowed exchange of text messages only up to 160 characters in length.The most popular use is to send photographs from...
(MMS), Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service
Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service
Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services is a point-to-multipoint interface specification for existing and upcoming 3GPP cellular networks, which is designed to provide efficient delivery of broadcast and multicast services, both within a cell as well as within the core network...
(MBMS) and Transparent end-to-end Packet-switched Streaming Service (PSS).
3G2 is defined in the 3GPP2 technical specification.
Technical details
The 3GP and 3G2 file formats are both structurally based on the ISO base media file formatISO base media file format
ISO base media file format defines a general structure for time-based multimedia files such as video and audio. It is used as the basis for other media file formats...
defined in ISO/IEC
IEC
-Organisations:* Independent Electoral Commission * Independent Electrical Contractors, a U.S. national trade association.* Institut d'Estudis Catalans , a Catalan academic institution....
14496-12 - MPEG-4
MPEG-4
MPEG-4 is a method of defining compression of audio and visual digital data. It was introduced in late 1998 and designated a standard for a group of audio and video coding formats and related technology agreed upon by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group under the formal standard ISO/IEC...
Part 12, but older versions of the 3GP file format did not use some of its features. 3GP and 3G2 are container formats similar to MPEG-4 Part 14
MPEG-4 Part 14
MPEG-4 Part 14 or MP4 is a multimedia container format standard specified as a part of MPEG-4. It is most commonly used to store digital video and digital audio streams, especially those defined by MPEG, but can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images...
(MP4), which is also based on MPEG-4 Part 12. The 3GP and 3G2 file format were designed to decrease storage and bandwidth requirements in order to accommodate mobile phone
Mobile phone
A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...
s.
3GP and 3G2 are similar standards, but with some differences:
- 3GPP3GPPThe 3rd Generation Partnership Project is a collaboration between groups of telecommunications associations, known as the Organizational Partners...
file format was designed for GSM-based Phones and may have the filename extension .3gp - 3GPP2 file format was designed for CDMACDMA2000CDMA2000 is a family of 3G mobile technology standards, which use CDMA channel access, to send voice, data, and signaling data between mobile phones and cell sites. The set of standards includes: CDMA2000 1X, CDMA2000 EV-DO Rev. 0, CDMA2000 EV-DO Rev. A, and CDMA2000 EV-DO Rev. B...
-based Phones and may have the filename extension .3g2
Some cell phones use the .mp4 extension for 3GP video.
3GP
The 3GP file format stores video streams as MPEG-4 Part 2MPEG-4 Part 2
MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual is a video compression technology developed by MPEG. It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It is a discrete cosine transform compression standard, similar to previous standards such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2...
or H.263
H.263
H.263 is a video compression standard originally designed as a low-bitrate compressed format for videoconferencing. It was developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group in a project ending in 1995/1996 as one member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T.H.263...
or MPEG-4 Part 10 (AVC/H.264), and audio streams as AMR-NB
Adaptive Multi-Rate
The Adaptive Multi-Rate audio codec is a patented audio data compression scheme optimized for speech coding. AMR was adopted as the standard speech codec by 3GPP in October 1999 and is now widely used in GSM and UMTS...
, AMR-WB
AMR-WB
Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband is a patented speech coding standard developed based on Adaptive Multi-Rate encoding, using similar methodology as Algebraic Code Excited Linear Prediction...
, AMR-WB+
AMR-WB+
Extended Adaptive Multi-Rate – Wideband is an audio codec that extends AMR-WB. It adds support for stereo signals and higher sampling rates. Another main improvement is the use of transform coding additionally to ACELP. This greatly improves the generic audio coding...
, AAC-LC
Advanced Audio Coding
Advanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....
, HE-AAC
HE-AAC
High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding is a lossy data compression scheme for digital audio defined as a MPEG-4 Audio profile in ISO/IEC 14496-3. It is an extension of Low Complexity AAC optimized for low-bitrate applications such as streaming audio...
v1 or Enhanced aacPlus (HE-AAC v2). 3GPP allowed use of AMR and H.263 codecs in the ISO base media file format (MPEG-4 Part 12), because 3GPP specified the usage of the Sample Entry and template fields in the ISO base media file format as well as defining new boxes to which codecs refer. These extensions were registered by the registration authority for code-points in ISO base media file format ("MP4 Family" files).
For the storage of MPEG-4 media specific information in 3GP files, the 3GP specification refers to MP4 and the AVC
file format, which are also based on the ISO base media file format. The MP4 and the AVC file format specifications described usage of MPEG-4 content in the ISO base media file format.
A 3GP file is always big-endian
Endianness
In computing, the term endian or endianness refers to the ordering of individually addressable sub-components within the representation of a larger data item as stored in external memory . Each sub-component in the representation has a unique degree of significance, like the place value of digits...
, storing and transferring the most significant bytes first.
3G2
The 3G2 file format can store the same video streams and most of the audio streams used in the 3GP file format. In addition, 3G2 stores audio streams as EVRCEVRC
Enhanced Variable Rate CODEC is a speech codec used in CDMA networks. It was developed in 1995 to replace the QCELP vocoder which used more bandwidth on the carrier's network, thus EVRC's primary goal was to offer the mobile carriers more capacity on their networks while not increasing the amount...
, EVRC-B
EVRC-B
Enhanced Variable Rate Codec B is a speech codec used by CDMA networks. EVRC-B is an enhancement to EVRC and compresses each 20 milliseconds of 8000 Hz, 16-bit sampled speechinput into output frames of one of the four different sizes:...
, EVRC-WB, 13K (QCELP
QCELP
Qualcomm code-excited linear prediction , also known as Qualcomm PureVoice, is a speech codec developed in 1994 by Qualcomm to increase the speech quality of the IS-96A codec earlier used in CDMA networks. It was later replaced with EVRC since it provides better speech quality with fewer bits...
), SMV
SMV
Selectable Mode Vocoder is variable bitrate speech coding standard used in CDMA2000 networks. SMV provides multiple modes of operation that are selected based on input speech characteristics....
or VMR-WB
VMR-WB
Variable-Rate Multimode Wideband is a source-controlled variable-rate multimode codec designed for robust encoding/decoding of wideband/narrowband speech. The operation of VMR-WB is controlled by speech signal characteristics and by traffic condition of the network...
, which was specified by 3GPP2 for use in ISO base media file format. The 3G2 specification also defined some enhancements to 3GPP Timed Text. 3G2 file format does not store Enhanced aacPlus (HE-AAC v2) and AMR-WB+ audio streams. For the storage of MPEG-4 media (AAC audio, MPEG-4 Part 2 video, MPEG-4 Part 10 - H.264/AVC) in 3G2 files, the 3G2 specification refers to the MP4 file format and the AVC file format specification, which described usage of this content in the ISO base media file format. For the storage of H.263 and AMR content 3G2 specification refers to the 3GP file format specification.
Device support
- Most 3G3G3G or 3rd generation mobile telecommunications is a generation of standards for mobile phones and mobile telecommunication services fulfilling the International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 specifications by the International Telecommunication Union...
capable mobile phones support the playback and recording of video in 3GP format (memory, maximum filesize for playback and recording, and resolution limits exist and vary). - Some newer/higher-end phones without 3G capabilities may also playback and record in this format (again, with said limitations).
- Audio importedRippingRipping is the process of copying audio or video content to a hard disk, typically from removable media. The word is used to refer to all forms of media. Despite the name, neither the media nor the data is damaged after extraction....
from CD onto a PlayStation 3PlayStation 3The is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment and the successor to the PlayStation 2 as part of the PlayStation series. The PlayStation 3 competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles...
when it is set to encode to the MPEG-4 AACAdvanced Audio CodingAdvanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....
codec will copy onto USB devices in the 3GP format. - The Nintendo DSiNintendo DSiThe is a handheld game system created by Nintendo and launched in 2008 and 2009 in Japan, North America, PAL territories, and other regions. It is the third iteration of the Nintendo DS, and its primary market rival is Sony's PlayStation Portable...
supports .3gp on an SD cardSecure DigitalSecure Digital is a non-volatile memory card format developed by the SD Card Association for use in portable devices. The SD technology is used by more than 400 brands across dozens of product categories and more than 8,000 models, and is considered the de-facto industry standard.Secure Digital...
.
Software support
When transferred to a computer, 3GP movies can be viewed on LinuxLinux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, Mac, and Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
platforms with MPlayer
MPlayer
MPlayer is a free and open source media player. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS and MorphOS are also available. The Windows version works, with some minor...
and VLC media player
VLC media player
VLC media player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project.VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to...
. Programs such as Media Player Classic
Media Player Classic
Media Player Classic is a compact media player for 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows. The application mimics the look and feel of the old, lightweight Windows Media Player 6.4 but integrates most options and features found in modern media players...
, K-Multimedia Player
K-Multimedia Player
K-Multimedia Player is a media player software for Microsoft Windows which can play a large number of formats including VCD, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg, OGM, 3GP, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, RealMedia, FLV and QuickTime...
, Totem
Totem (media player)
Totem is a media player for the GNOME computer desktop environment which runs on GNU/Linux, Solaris, BSD and other Unix and Unix-like systems. It is officially included in GNOME starting from version 2.10 , but de facto it was already included in most GNOME environments...
, RealPlayer
RealPlayer
RealPlayer is a cross-platform media player by RealNetworks that plays a number of multimedia formats including MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media, and multiple versions of proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats.-History:...
, QuickTime
QuickTime
QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...
, and GOM Player
Gom player
GOM Player is a 32-bit media player for Microsoft Windows, distributed by the Gretech Corporation of South Korea. It is alleged that Gretech distributes GOM Player in violation of copyright law....
can also be used.
3GP files can be encoded and decoded with open source software FFmpeg
FFmpeg
FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...
.
External links
- 3GPP codecs specifications; 3G and beyond / GSM, 26 series
- 3GPP file format (3GP); 3GPP TS 26.244; Transparent end-to-end packet switched streaming service (PSS) - specification
- 3GPP2 specifications
- 3GPP2 File Formats for Multimedia Services; 3GPP2 C.S0050-B Version 1.0 - specification
- 3GP file format and 3GP players information
- RFC 3839, MIME Type Registrations for 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Multimedia files
- RFC 4393, MIME Type Registrations for 3GPP2 Multimedia Files
- RFC 4281, The Codecs Parameter for "Bucket" Media Types