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Digital Video Formats: Audio Video Interleave (.Avi)

The document discusses several common digital video formats: - AVI and ASF are older Microsoft formats that are still supported but newer formats are preferred. - QuickTime (.mov) is Apple's format and remains popular as most devices can play .mov files. - AVCHD is a collaboration format used by digital camcorders that supports HD and metadata. - Flash Video (.flv) was widely used on websites but has declined due to bugs and lack of support on mobile. - MP4 is widely compatible while M4V contains Apple DRM. Codecs like h.264 and MPEG-2 are contained in various formats and used for different applications.

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Arjun Vysakh
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177 views

Digital Video Formats: Audio Video Interleave (.Avi)

The document discusses several common digital video formats: - AVI and ASF are older Microsoft formats that are still supported but newer formats are preferred. - QuickTime (.mov) is Apple's format and remains popular as most devices can play .mov files. - AVCHD is a collaboration format used by digital camcorders that supports HD and metadata. - Flash Video (.flv) was widely used on websites but has declined due to bugs and lack of support on mobile. - MP4 is widely compatible while M4V contains Apple DRM. Codecs like h.264 and MPEG-2 are contained in various formats and used for different applications.

Uploaded by

Arjun Vysakh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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DIGITAL VIDEO FORMATS

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 were once a workhorse of digital
video. If I say “AVI is dead” the comments section will clog with people still
using it, so I'll say that it's popularity has waned, but there is still lots of legacy
AVI to be found all over the web. Short answer, don't output video to it, but keep
a player handy.

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 Digital Rights Management (DRM), a form
of copy protection. It was designed for streaming video from media servers or
over the Internet. Short answer, again, don't output video to it, but keep a player
handy.

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. Quicktime, like
Microsoft's version, .avi, looked like it was going to fade into the sunset but just
as it was about to die, Apple released the Mavrick update and quietly replaced
anything inside a .mov container with h.264. In fact, both Nikon and Canon
DSLR's output

h.264 video wrapped in a .mov container. Short answer: Sure, why not. Most
people will be able to read .mov files for a while now.

Advanced Video Coding, High Definition (AVCHD)


AVCHD is a very popular container for data compressed with h.264 — it comes
to us through 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 in a variety of frame rates including 60 frames per
second, 24p native as well as 3D modes.

It's an extraordinarily robust container format that includes not just things like
subtitles, but menu navigation and slideshows with audio. Short answer: Yes.

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. 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 ubiquitous. It looked really
cool, but it didn't work with everything. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs took
Flash out behind the barn like a rabid dog when he called it "buggy” and blamed
it for problems with the Apple Operating System, refusing to support it on
mobile devices in favor of HTML5, we're just waiting for the shot. Short answer:
not if you have other options.

.M4V and .MP4

.m4v and .mp4 are very similar and are both part of MPEG-4 which was based
on the Quicktime file format. .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. It is used, among other places, when distributing
content from iTunes. As a result, many non-Apple devices (such as my Sharp
television) will refuse to play .m4v files. However, the formats are so similar that
in instances where the DRM isn't being used, simply changing the file extension
to .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.

Codecs that are Also Containers

As if things aren't confusing enough, some containers have codecs with the same
name.

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. Short answer: No.

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). Short answer: No.

Codecs

Windows Media Video (.wmv)

Once it was realized that the Internet was a delivery vehicle for things like video,
people started trying to come up with ways to share video that wouldn't take up a
lot of bandwidth and disk space. One of the big advances was the idea 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 wait
two hours for a movie to download before you can start watching. Over the years
the WMV format has grown to include support for high definition 720 and 1080
video. To make things complicated, files that end in .wmv are usually stored in
an .asf container.

h.264
Not only do you need to call the MPEG-2 compression codec h.262, you have to
keep from confusing it with h.264, which is used to compress Blu-ray disks as
well as lots of web video. One of the very nice things about h.264 is that you can
use it at very low and very high bitrates. The h.264 will send highly compressed
low resolution video across the web and then happily encode your high definition
movie at super high bitrates for delivery to a High Definition television. This is a
very common codec for camcorders and digital video cameras. Its container is
AVCHD.

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