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All of this means that H.265 will pave the way for better-quality videos while keeping file sizes reasonable.
x265 (H.265/MPEG-H HEVC) - First introduced in 2013, H.265 is the up-and-coming successor to H.264, allowing more than twice the data compression while keeping the same video quality. x264 is an open source implementation that allegedly produces higher-quality videos at smaller file sizes. x264 (H.264/MPEG-4 AVC) - First introduced in 2003, H.264 is best known as one of the encoding standards used on Blu-ray videos and as the most popular encoding standard for video streaming, used by sites like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Xvid (H.263/MPEG-4 Part 2) - First introduced in 2001 as an open source competitor to DivX, Xvid became popular for its ability to compress DVD movies down to CD sizes without sacrificing much quality. Most Microsoft devices still support it, but it has fallen out of popular use in recent years. A file with the WMV extension is an ASF container with a WMV video track, but WMV video tracks can also be stored within AVI or MKV containers. WMV (Windows Media Video) - First introduced in 1999, WMV is a proprietary codec developed by Microsoft to be used with their proprietary ASF container format. Mismatched codecs are rare these days and should only happen with very old or very rare videos.
Even better, most devices and video player apps and software support most of these commonly-used codecs out of the box. Though the world hasn't decided on a single standard, the good news is that most videos are produced using one of the following four video codecs. It supports a wide variety of video and audio codecs but is most often used with H.263/H.264 for video and AAC for audio.
MP4 (MPEG-4 Version 2) - First introduced in 2001 but later revised in 2003, the MP4 format took the then-popular QuickTime File Format and improved on it in several ways. And while Matroska's popularity has been on the rise, it isn't universally supported yet. MKVs can contain virtually all kinds of video and audio codecs, plus multiple subtitle tracks and DVD menus and chapters, making it the most flexible format currently available.
MKV (Matroska Video Container) - First introduced in 2002, the Matroska format is both free and open standard, which has helped it to stay relevant over the years. Readability of AVI is almost universal, but it has some compression limitations that result in larger-than-average files. It can only contain video and audio tracks, and it can actually hold multiple tracks of each but this feature is rarely used. AVI (Audio Video Interlaced) - First introduced in 1992 by Microsoft, AVI videos were the most popular type throughout the 90s and into the early 2000s. When downloading videos off the web, there's a 99 percent chance that that file will be one of the following three container types: Of the many video container types that have ever been introduced, only a handful of them are used on a day-to-day basis. The thing is, container types don't necessarily dictate how data is encoded.
For example, a container format might have room for one video track, one audio track, and one subtitle track. The container type dictates what kinds of data can be held in the file and how that data is arranged within the file.
When you see a video file with a given extension, you're actually seeing the container type. The difference between these two things is what trips up most users, but once you understand this difference, you'll finally see why some video files are preferable to others. Multimedia files are composed of two parts: the container and the codec. Why does this happen? What do you need to know in order to avoid these headaches yourself? Here's everything you need to know about video formats, containers, and codecs. So instead of watching in the comfort of my living room as I'd intended, I had to watch on my laptop.
How frustrating is it when you download a video that's only available in a format that isn't supported by the device you want to use?įor example, I recently downloaded a video course comprised of MOV files, a format unsupported by my old and outdated smart TV. Why do so many video formats exist? Why can't we all just agree on one and stick to it? There are so many out there, many of which have gone extinct but many that haven't.