[Mp4-tech] MPEG-4 Codec Choice?

[周力]

Hello list,
I work for a Chinese company who is developing a embedded software 
implementation of IPTV based on AVS. AVS stands for Audio Visual Systems 
which is new Chinese national standard approved in March 2006.
As the maturity of AVS is not there yet. I am required by my employer to 
set up a IPTV showroom based on MPEG-4 first. Here comes some problems. 
There are many MPEG-4 codecs but it seems that they are not compatible 
to each other. For example, a MP4 file exported from QuickTime won't 
play with Microsoft Media Player. As I realize that MP4 is just another 
container format like AVI so it seems that I have to bundle the solution 
to a specific MPEG-4 codec. There is no single MPEG-4 decoder that can 
decode all the MPEG-4 variants or there is?
Thanks for any advice on this.
Zhou Li