Media Formats Explained. Like my Top 1. 3 things not to do page, this page is mainly intended to vent my irritation towards things that bother me on the internet. The topic of today is multimedia formats and the lack of knowledge thereabout by the average person. Many people do not know the difference between a container format and a codec. Other people have some mostly unjustified hatred against certain media formats and try to justify this hatred with pseudo knowledge when bashing those formats on forums and newsgroups. Sophies World Game For Windows. This hatred is often rooted in ignorance about the subject in question. Instead of descending to the same level as those people and insulting them on the same forums and newsgroups, I will now try to give a shot at re education. Encode Webm Adobe Media Encoder Wmv' title='Encode Webm Adobe Media Encoder Wmv' />If youre going to understand online video, you need to understand codecs. Heres a highlevel look at what codecs are, as well as the variety of codecs relevant to. Pavtube Video Converter helps users convert WMV, AVI, TiVo, MKV, AVCHD MTS files to H. TS, MKV, MPEG, MP4, 3GP. SMPTE 421M, informally known as VC1, is a video coding format. It was initially developed as the proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 by Microsoft in 2003. This article was written around the year 2. Although the first parts are general and will always be applicable, the information about specific containers, codecs and media players is starting to become dated e. WMV codecs are not as closed and proprietary as the ones at the time this article was written, etc. I gave up on keeping the page updated with information about the latest new codecs, therefore you may want to look elsewhere if you want to have the most up to date information. Because this text is quite long, heres a summary. A media file like a. MOV,. AVI or. WMV, is a container file. If youre talking about a format, you are actually talking about the container format. A container file specifies how the data streams inside it are organized, but doesnt say anything about how the actual data is represented. This is the task of the codecs. A codec describes how video or audio data is to be compressed and decompressed. Theoretically, you can use any codec inside any container format. Encode Webm Adobe Media Encoder Wmv' title='Encode Webm Adobe Media Encoder Wmv' />However, codecs are traditionally licensed exclusively to a certain format. For instance, the Sorenson codec is only found in Quick. Time files and WMV video is only used in Windows Media files. Many people dont know the difference between formats and codecs, hence think that. Quick. Time files use the infamous Sorenson codec and are a pain in the ass to play. Or, they think that AVI files will always be good quality because they would use the DIVX codec. There is no ideal format for all situations. Some formats are easier to use on certain platforms, some are nearly impossible to use. If you need to embed movies in your website, the best way to deal with this problem is to give the user a choice between several different formats. Container formats vs. The most common mistake people make, is confusing container formats with codecs. Many people hate Quick. Wild Media Server UPnP, DLNA, HTTP version 3. Added support for DAAP protocol and playback of audio and video files in Apple iTunes. Tipard MXF Converter can easily convert MXFP2 MXF files to MOV, MP4, AVI, etc. Phone, iPad, iPod, Android devices, FCP, iMovie, Adobe Premiere Pro, etc. Time, but in fact what theyre actually hating is the Sorenson codec, even though they dont even know what it is. Other people think AVI is a great format because it delivers good quality. I can make you an AVI that will make you puke. And other people wonder why one AVI or MOV plays fine on their computer while another one gives no image or sound. When you download an AVI, MOV or WMV movie, youre downloading a container file. As the name says, it is a file which contains something else. In the specifications for MOV or AVI files, you will find nothing about how to store, compress or decompress actual video or audio data. The only thing these files do, is providing a wrapper around data streams. When talking about a format, youre talking about the structure of a container file. So saying that the AVI format has good video compression is nonsense, because the format has nothing to do with how the video is compressed. Inside those container files, there are one or more data streams. The most common files have one video stream and one audio stream, but in more advanced formats like Quick. Time, there can be any amount and type of streams. Any container that is designed for streaming either from a sequential medium like a DVD, or the internet will interleave the streams in chunks. This ensures that data that belongs together temporally, e. Again, the format specifications only say how these streams are to be included in the file, not whats in the streams themselves. This is where the codecs come into play. In almost all cases, video and audio data will be compressed, which means it will be stored in a way that takes less space than if the data would simply be represented in raw form. The compression scheme will typically be specified by the codec and is often an integral part of it. A simple codec could take a raw stream of data and send it through a compression scheme like ZIP, but most practical codecs will try to do something more advanced. Compression schemes are divided into two categories a codec that preserves the original data with perfect accuracy is called a lossless codec, a codec that is unable to perfectly reconstruct the original data is called a lossy codec. Brorsoft Video Converter for Mac is an professional Mac Video Converter to convert videos among MKV, MPEG, MP4, 3GP, MOV, AVI, MXF, MTS, M2TS, TiVo, VOB, etc on Mac. Youtube app Windows 7 Free Download Windows 7 youtube app Windows 7 Download Free Windows7 Download. Best iOrgsoft video converter can efficient converting between video, audio and movies files, transfer video to various devices on Windows xpWindows 8. MOV, WMV, AVI, MPEG, MP3, OGG, WMA, Media Formats Explained. Like my Top 13 things not to do page, this page is mainly intended to vent my irritation. Windows Media Video WMV is the name of a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media. Lossy codecs are designed such that they degrade the signal in a way that is minimally visible or audible. They do this by throwing away data that is the least noticeable according to a so called psychoacoustic or psychovisual model. A short list of the most common container formats, the file extensions they use, and a bit of history. Quick. Time. MOV,. QT this was the first real successful multimedia format, introduced by Apple Computer, and it dates back to 1. The first versions were only available for Mac OS but a Windows version soon followed. From the start on, Quick. Time was quite advanced, with support for any amount of streams and multi segmented files. Editing a movie is simple and intuitive. Later versions even allowed scripting and interactive features. I remember viewing albeit very short movies of Apollo launches and a heap of camel bones fusing into a skeleton, while on a PC the most exciting thing one could do was watching an animated GIF. Video for Windows. AVI of course Microsoft had to make a clone1a of Quick. Time as soon as possible, and they managed to do it within one year. Maybe this is why the original Vf. W specification was such a braindead format. It didnt have most of the advanced features Quick. Time has. The format was extended by the Open. DML group to tackle some limitations of the original specification. Later on, MS dropped support for AVI in favour of their new WMV format. One reason was that Vf. W was not a big success. The main reason however was probably because AVI had become the format of choice for pirated movies maybe due to the link between the simplicity of the format and the simplicity of the average teenage scriptkiddie pirate. Arrrr. Technically however, those movies are not AVI files because Microsofts Vf. W specification doesnt allow the use of the typical pirate codecs. Div. X. DIVX at the time of this writing, this format is totally identical to AVI, at least the kind of unofficial AVI with the non standard codecs. This is also the reason why the company which produces the now legal Div. X codec has changed the file extension. Although Microsoft abandoned AVI, they still dont like it to be associated with pirated movies. Mind that due to this name change theres now a Div. X format and a Div. X codec. Real. Video. RM this was one of the first more succesful competitors for Quick. Time, although it never really became very popular either, probably due to the fact that initially it could only be played in the extremely proprietary Real. Player. There is also an audio only variant called Real. Audio. RA,. RAM. Windows Media.