GPAC was created as an implementation of the MPEG-4 Systems standard written in ANSI C and later extended in Streaming Media.

Such content can be any combination of audio, video, subtitles, metadata, encrypted media, rendering and ECMAScript.

GPAC is best known for its wide MP4/ISOBMFF capabilities and is popular among video enthusiasts, academic researchers, standardization bodies, and professional broadcasters.

[3] In parallel, as MPEG-4 was intended to compete with Macromedia Flash, GPAC evolved to support other standards such as X3D, W3C SVG Tiny 1.2, and OMA/3GPP/ISMA and eventually MPEG-DASH.

[11] The new gpac application has been used as a FFmpeg on steroids[12] offering additional speed, features, ease of use.