Documentation

Documentation

The documentation for Bento4 consists of pages hosted on this site, documents stored as files in the source distribution and SDKs, as well as embedded documentation in the source code header files.

MPEG DASH Packager

The MPEG DASH Overview page is the starting point for information on MPEG DASH packaging.
For a more advanced, detailed set of options, you can also directly consult the documentation for the mp4dash tool.

HLS Packager

The HLS Overview page is the starting point for information HLS packaging.
For a more advanced and detailed set of options, you can also directly consult the documentation for the mp4hls tool.

Tools Documentation

  • mp4info displays high level info about an MP4 file, including all tracks and codec details
  • mp4dump displays the entire atom/box structure of an MP4 file
  • mp4edit add/insert/remove/replace atom/box items of an MP4 file
  • mp4extract extracts an atom/box from an MP4 file
  • mp4encrypt encrypts an MP4 file (multiple encryption schemes are supported)
  • mp4decrypt decrypts an MP4 file (multiple encryption schemes are supported)
  • mp4dcfpackager encrypts a media file into an OMA DCF file
  • mp4compact converts stsz tables into stz2 tables to create more compact MP4 files
  • mp4fragment creates a fragmented MP4 file from a non-fragmented one.
  • mp4split splits a fragmented MP4 file into discrete files
  • mp4tag show/edit MP4 metadata (iTunes-style and others)
  • mp4mux multiplexes one or more elementary streams (H264, AAC) into an MP4 file
  • mp42aac extract a raw AAC elementary stream from an MP4 file
  • mp42avc extract a raw AVC/H.264 elementary stream from an MP4 file
  • mp42hls converts an MP4 file to an HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) presentation, including the generation of the segments and .m3u8 playlist as well as AES-128 and SAMPLE-AES (for FairPlay) encryption. This can be used as a replacement for Apple’s mediafilesegmenter tool.
  • mp42ts converts an MP4 file to an MPEG2-TS file.
  • mp4dash creates an MPEG DASH output from one or more MP4 files, including encryption.
  • mp4dashclone creates a local clone of a remote or local MPEG DASH presentation, optionally encrypting the segments as they are cloned.
  • mp4hls creates a multi-bitrate HLS master playlist from one or more MP4 files, including support for encryption and I-frame-only playlists. This can be used as a replacement for Apple’s variantplaylistcreator tool.

Library API Documentation

Some of the API documentation is produced from the source code comments using Doxygen. The doxygen output is available as a windows CHM file in Bento4.chm, and a set of HTML pages zipped together in Bento4-HTML.zip (to start, open the file named index.html with an HTML browser)

Licensing

Consult the about page for GPL and non-GPL licensing information.