As of today, October 20th, 2000, the MPEG 4 spec is not complete. As I understand it (and I'm not part of the spec team, so I could be wrong), the video and audio codec specs are complete, but nobody has implemented and shipped one yet. There are several other parts to the spec which are not complete.
There are a few non-compliant codecs around, such as the DivX and MS-MPEG4 codecs on Windows. Despite the fact that some people mistake these for MPEG4, they are not compliant with the part of the spec which has been finished. For that reason, I recommend you don't touch them, as the more people who use them, the more non-compliant files we'll end up with, and it will be a big mess for everyone trying to determine which files can be played back and which can't, and why. I am also led to believe that their quality is significantly lower than what will be produced with compliant MPEG4 codecs.
There has been a rather enlightening discussion of this recently on Apple's Quicktime-talk list. If you have more questions about it, you may want to ask there.
Darrin
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