Are All Video File Formats Same? Video File Formats Explained!

     Everyone reading this article has some sort of media player installed on their device for media consumption. But, your device, Mobile, Laptop, Desktop, Tablet, What have you, Already has media players installed in it. In case of Windows they provide you with Windows Media Player and in case of Android you have your custom players. Even though you have them installed most have VLC Player too. The reason is that VLC supports more Video and Audio file formats than your default player. Are you wondering why don’t we just have a Universal File Format? We don’t live in an imaginary world so let’s just understand the existing one. 

     Before we understand Video File Formats we should take a look at Codecs. Codes stands for coder-decoder also known as Compressor-Decompressor are true to their name and are different than file Formats and function in two parts- Hardware and Software as a tool that encodes and decodes audio or video File Formats. There are thousands of audio and video codecs, ranging in cost from free to hundreds of dollars or more. This variety of codecs can create compatibility and obsolescence issues. The impact is lessened for older formats, for which free or nearly-free codecs have existed for a long time. Video file formats are also known as containers, Which makes sense as it contains Audio, Video and Metadata. The older formats are often ill-suited to modern applications, however, such as playback in small portable devices. But, your Desktop is no portable device so let’s head on towards Newer Video File Formats.

     In this post, We will cover the top 5 widely used Video File Formats. Here is a list of all of them in no particular order.

File Format (Extension)	Full Form (Name)
AVI	Audio Video Interleave
FLV	Flash Video Format
WMV	Windows Media Video
MOV	Apple QuickTime Movie
MP4	Moving Pictures Expert Group 4

   MP4 (Moving Pictures Expert Group 4)

    MP4 is based on QuickTime File Format. .mp4 is enough to convince the device to play the file. Doing this will cause Apple QuickTime based applications such as Apple TV to be unable to find some contents of the file, namely chapter markers and AC3 encoded audio streams. By the way, .m4v was created by Apple as an extension of MPEG-4 with the option of proprietary Apple DRM to keep their files from playing on non-apple devices.

   WMV (Windows Media Video)

    Back when it was realized that the Web was a distribution means of transportation for things like video, people began trying to come up with ways to share video that wouldn't take up a lot of bandwidth and disk space. One of the biggest advances was the impression of streaming video — where your computer downloads only a part of a video and begins to play while the download continues — this means you don't have to postponement two hours for a movie to download before you can start watching. Over the years the WMV format has developed to include support for high definition 720 and 1080 video. To make things problematical, files that end in .wmv are usually stored in an .asf file formats.

   AVI (Audio Video Interleave)

    Technologically advanced by Microsoft and at large with Windows 3.1 way back when false teeth were still made out of wood, AVI files were once a pillar of digital video. If I say “AVI is dead” the comments section will congest with people still using it, so I'll say that it's admiration has declined, but there is still lots of inheritance AVI to be found all over the web. Short answer, don't output video to it, but keep a player manageable.

   FLV (Flash Video Format)

    Flash was initially developed by a firm so-called Macromedia which was acquired by Adobe in 2005. Flash has been around for a while and comes in multiple versions, some better than others. Older Flash video frequently uses the Sorenson codec, newer Flash uses h.264. At one time, websites that appeared as a blank page with a message “You must download and install the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player to view this content” were abundant.

   MOV (Apple QuickTime Movie)

    Apple developed MOV and supports a wide selection of codecs. It's a patented format though and Apple decides what it supports. Quicktime, like Microsoft's type, .avi, seemed like it was going to fade away into the sunset but just as it was about to pass away, Apple released the Mavrick update and silently swapped anything inside a .mov container with h.264. In fact, both Nikon and Canon DSLR's output h.264 video covered in a .mov file format.

     That is all to have know about Video File Formats or Containers and now you know about Codecs too, Nothing wrong with that I guess. There is not much to know about their qualiteies and features, Since most of these offer same thing in diiferent realms and softwares. If you want to know about Image File Foramts in detail, You can go here. It is thebest place to learn about Image file formats easily. And ofcourse of you want to know more about Tech and see some Tech news come here more often at Rohan Wayangankar’s Blog.

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