This article explains main video formats and later compares with photos the quality.
Audio Video Interleave (.avi)
Developed by Microsoft and released with Windows 3.1 way back when false teeth were still made out of wood, AVI files have been a work horse of digital video. Although its popularity has been waning, lots of legacy video in AVI can be found all over the web. More recently, AVI has been abandoned for Microsoft's WMV (Windows Media Video).
One of the most maddening things about AVI today is that the format doesn't allow for specifying an aspect ratio, so a 16:9 AVI video may start displaying at 4:3 - this is less of a problem if your player allows you to manually select aspect ratios. If you're watching in the non-pro version of QuickTime though, you'll have to learn to live with people being unusually narrow.
Advanced Systems Format (.asf)
QuickTime (.mov or .qt)
QuickTime was developed by Apple and supports a wide variety of codecs. It's a proprietary format though and Apple decides what it supports.
Advanced Video Coding, High Definition (AVCHD)
AVCHD is a very popular container for data compressed with the H.264 - it comes to us through a collaboration between Sony and Panasonic as a format for digital camcorders. It's a file based format, meaning that it's meant to be stored and played back on disks or other storage devices (such as compact flash drives or SD cards). It supports both standard definition and a variety of high definition variants from 720 to 1080p. The latest version (AVCHD 2.0) also supports 3D as well as some high frame rates.
Flash Video (.flv, .swf)
MPEG-1
MPEG-1 is used almost exclusively for Video Compact Disks (VCD), which are extraordinarily popular in some parts of the world but never caught on in the U.S. - the video quality is substantially lower than DVDs.
MPEG-2 (H.262)
MPEG-2 is a container format, but there is also a codec of the same name, which most people call H.262, so that it's not so confusing. Though a world where we call something H.262 is already more confusing than it ought to be. MPEG-2 is used for DVDs and pretty much nothing else with the exception of broadcast High Definition Television (HDTV).
HEVC stands for high-efficiencyvideocoding. Also known as H.265, this new video codec will compress video files to half the size possible using the most-efficient current encoding format, MPEG-4, aka H.264 (used on Blu-ray discs and some satellite TV broadcasts). That will be one-quarter the size of files compressed using the MPEG 2 codec that most cable-TV companies still employ. More importantly, HEVC is used to compress video with 4K resolution — and possibly even 8K resolution in the future — so it can be efficiently delivered.
VP9 is an open and royalty free video coding format developed by Google. VP9 had earlier development names of Next Gen Open Video (NGOV) and VP-Next.
Audio Video Interleave (.avi)
Developed by Microsoft and released with Windows 3.1 way back when false teeth were still made out of wood, AVI files have been a work horse of digital video. Although its popularity has been waning, lots of legacy video in AVI can be found all over the web. More recently, AVI has been abandoned for Microsoft's WMV (Windows Media Video).
One of the most maddening things about AVI today is that the format doesn't allow for specifying an aspect ratio, so a 16:9 AVI video may start displaying at 4:3 - this is less of a problem if your player allows you to manually select aspect ratios. If you're watching in the non-pro version of QuickTime though, you'll have to learn to live with people being unusually narrow.
Advanced Systems Format (.asf)
ASF is a proprietary Microsoft container that usually houses files compressed with Microsoft's WMV codec - to make things confusing, the files are usually designated .wmv and not .asf. The ASF container has the advantage over many other formats that it is able to include DRM (Digital Rights Management), a form of copy protection.
QuickTime (.mov or .qt)
QuickTime was developed by Apple and supports a wide variety of codecs. It's a proprietary format though and Apple decides what it supports.
Advanced Video Coding, High Definition (AVCHD)
AVCHD is a very popular container for data compressed with the H.264 - it comes to us through a collaboration between Sony and Panasonic as a format for digital camcorders. It's a file based format, meaning that it's meant to be stored and played back on disks or other storage devices (such as compact flash drives or SD cards). It supports both standard definition and a variety of high definition variants from 720 to 1080p. The latest version (AVCHD 2.0) also supports 3D as well as some high frame rates.
Flash Video (.flv, .swf)
Flash was originally created by a company 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 often uses the Sorenson codec, newer Flash uses H.264. It's an extremely widespread container format used for streaming video across the web. Its major downside is that it will not play on iOS devices such as iPads or iPhones, a conscious decision made by Apple CEO Steve Jobs who famously called Flash "buggy" and blamed it for problems with the Apple Operating System. Jobs opted to skip Flash support in the belief that the HTML5 standardization of video display would solve streaming problems.
MPEG-1
MPEG-1 is used almost exclusively for Video Compact Disks (VCD), which are extraordinarily popular in some parts of the world but never caught on in the U.S. - the video quality is substantially lower than DVDs.
MPEG-2 (H.262)
MPEG-2 is a container format, but there is also a codec of the same name, which most people call H.262, so that it's not so confusing. Though a world where we call something H.262 is already more confusing than it ought to be. MPEG-2 is used for DVDs and pretty much nothing else with the exception of broadcast High Definition Television (HDTV).
HEVC stands for high-efficiencyvideocoding. Also known as H.265, this new video codec will compress video files to half the size possible using the most-efficient current encoding format, MPEG-4, aka H.264 (used on Blu-ray discs and some satellite TV broadcasts). That will be one-quarter the size of files compressed using the MPEG 2 codec that most cable-TV companies still employ. More importantly, HEVC is used to compress video with 4K resolution — and possibly even 8K resolution in the future — so it can be efficiently delivered.
VP9 is an open and royalty free video coding format developed by Google. VP9 had earlier development names of Next Gen Open Video (NGOV) and VP-Next.
Useful information..good work
ReplyDeleteMJPEG?
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteInteresting information.
VCRG2MCQWOS: The Improved Video Codec By Microsoft And Sony