This is a thing that has been rounded my mind for a couple of years. The fact is that I'm unable to understand where the name of MP4 player comes. At the beginning I thought it was a word invented in Colombia in order to refer an mp3 player with video capabilities, but then I found that the word really came printed in the boxes of the players. So lets go to the facts.
As some of you may know, mp3 stands for MPEG-1 Layer 3 which is a compression method for audio files which takes some of the ideas in the jpeg image format. mp4 stands for MPEG-4 part 14 and was originally conceived as the successor of the mp3 format, this one is a modification in order to improve the performance of the mp3 based in the QuickTime format, which allows, being a container format, to encode audio an video, although, it never achieve the goal of being as popular as the format it tried to replace.
In the other hand, we have the, raising in popularity, mp4 players. Which, curiously, are unable to decode the mp4 format. My theory of the name of this players is the one I explained, like an mp3 player plus more. Then I would named otherwise. If we take the idea of mp3 plus more, we can take the leap to mp3+1 player and this leads to one of my favorite terms. mp3++ player (I'm not hiding which one is one of my favorites programming languages). The other fact I found hilarious about this is that the iPod resembles all the specs of an mp4 player, but you will never find it named like an mp4 player, it is only an iPod. Hilarious, isn't it?
So, from now on, I'll never call an mp4 player that way, for me, it will simply be an mp3++ player.
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