History

Most Chinese MP4 player manufacturers claim that the first player was produced by the French company Archos in 2002. So, many manufacturers of Chinese MP3 players at that time saw it as an opportunity and launched advertisement campaigns to promote their own brands of video-capable MP3 players as "MP4 players." They advertised that their MP4 players would be the successor to MP3 players, despite at that time, many of their "MP4 players" were just enhanced MP3 players capable of very limited video playback functions. Only a few were able to play MPEG-4 video stored in ASF format. Even fewer were able to play MPEG-4 video stored in AVI format. Later on, as more companies started to sell MP4 players with more advanced video playback capabilities, they started a "true MP4 player vs. false MP4 player" advertisement campaign which had somewhat successfully driven the less advanced video-capable MP3 players back to the MP3 player market, standardizing and stabilizing the Chinese MP4 player market.