ISO/IEC 14496-4:2004 specifies how tests can be designed to verify whether bitstreams and decoders meet requirements specified in ISO/IEC 14496 (parts 1, 2 and 3) and for ISO/IEC 14496-6:2000. It specifies how tests can be designed for bitstream delivery over various delivery technologies in an interoperable transparent manner to ISO/IEC 14496 (parts 1, 2 and 3). Encoders are not addressed specifically. An encoder may be said to be an ISO/IEC 14496 encoder if it generates bitstreams compliant with the syntactic and semantic bitstream requirements specified in ISO/IEC 14496 (parts 1, 2 and 3).

Procedures are described for testing conformance of bitstreams and decoders to the requirements defined in ISO/IEC 14496 (parts 1, 2 and 3). Given the set of characteristics claimed, the requirements that must be met are fully determined by ISO/IEC 14496 (parts 1, 2 and 3). ISO/IEC 14496-4:2004 summarizes the requirements, cross references them to characteristics and defines how conformance with them can be tested. Guidelines are given on constructing tests to verify bitstream and decoder conformance. ISO/IEC 14496-4:2004 gives guidelines on how to construct bitstream test suites to check or verify decoder conformance. In addition, some test bitstreams implemented according to those guidelines are provided as an electronic annex to ISO/IEC 14496-4:2004. These test bitstreams are documented in the various sections of ISO/IEC 14496-4:2004. The procedures and signaling messages for session and channel establishment are defined in ISO/IEC 14496-6:2000.

Conformance with the signaling messages and procedures in ISO/IEC 14496-4:2004 are defined in accordance with the specifications in ISO/IEC 14496-6:2000. This specification allows the manufacturer to identify the conformance of the signaling message in a static review and provides abstract test cases to test the conformance to the procedures in a dynamic review of an implementation as defined in ISO/IEC 9646 (all parts), the Conformance Testing series of standards.