Profile and Level in MPEG-4

MPEG-4 provides a large and rich set of tools (http://www.m4if.org/resources/profiles/visualtools.php) for the coding of visual objects. For effective implementation of the standard,subsets of the MPEG-4 tool sets have been provided for use in specific applications.These subsets, called 'Profiles', limit the size of the tool set a decoder is required to implement.In order to restrict computational complexity, one or more 'Levels' are set for each Profile. A Profile@Level combination allows:

. a codec builder to implement only the subset of the standard
he needs, while maintaining interworking with other MPEG-4
devices that implement the same combination, and

. checking whether MPEG-4 devices comply with the standard
('conformance testing').

reference:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3640#page-31

http://www.m4if.org/resources/profiles/