3GP

3GP - is the new mobile phone video file format. 3GPP, 3GPP2 are the new worldwide standard for the creation, delivery and playback of multimedia over 3rd generation, high-speed wireless networks. Defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project and 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 respectively, these standards seek to provide uniform delivery of rich multimedia over newly evolved, broadband mobile networks (3rd generation networks) to the latest multimedia-enabled wireless devices.

AAC

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at many bit rates. AAC is best known use is as the default audio format of Apple's iPhone, iPod, iTunes, and the format used for all iTunes Store audio.AAC is also the standard audio format for PS3 and PSP, Walkman Phones from Sony Ericsson, Nseries Phones from Nokia.

AC3

It is also referred as Dolby Digital and is the reigning standard for surround sound technology in general and 5.1-channel surround sound in particular. The superior coding efficiency of Dolby Digital-and its ability to deliver high-quality discrete multichannel audio without compromising video quality-has made it the designated audio standard for DVD worldwide. Dolby Digital is also the preferred multichannel audio standard for direct broadcast direct to home satellite and digital cable systems. Nearly 60 million digital cable and satellite set-top boxes are currently in use worldwide supported by over 30 million audio/video receivers equipped with 5.1-channel Dolby Digital decoding.

FLV (Flash Video)

FLV is a proprietary file format used to deliver video over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player (formerly known as Macromedia Flash Player) version 6, 7, 8, or 9. FLV content may also be embedded within SWF files. Notable users of the FLV format include YouTube, Google Video, Reuters.com, Yahoo! Video and MySpace.

AIFF

AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) is a file format used by Macintosh computers and Silicon Graphics Incorporated to store and transmit high-quality audio data such as music. It can store monaural, stereo or multi-channel sound as used for soundtracks. Apple Computer developed the AIFF format in 1987-88 in accordance with Electronic Arts Interchange File Format (IFF) standards. For this reason, AIFF files might have the extension .aif or .ief.

AMR

Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) is used in speech coding and involves audio data compression. Audio data compression allows for more storage on voice files. ".amt" is a popular filename extension for AMR. Many cell phones use AMR for speech recording storage. AMR is especially associated with the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). GSM, a circuit-switched system, originated in Europe in the 1980s and is used in many European countries. Several cellular companies in the United States and other non-European countries also use GSM technology. Speech coding uses a circuit speech codec, or voice codec, that digitally transforms speech. Music can be encoded and decoded in a voice codec, but the quality of the music produced is usually quite poor. The speech or voice codec is specifically made to analyze human speech rather than to offer quality sound in other audio forms such as music.

APE

Monkey’s Audio is a fast and easy way to compress digital music. Unlike traditional methods such as mp3, ogg, or lqt that permanently discard quality to save space, Monkey’s Audio only makes perfect, bit-for-bit copies of your music. That means it always sounds perfect – exactly the same as the original. Even though the sound is perfect, it still saves a lot of space. (think of it as a beefed-up Winzip™ for your music) The other great thing is that you can always decompress your Monkey's Audio files back to the exact, original files. That way, you'll never have to recopy your CD collection to switch formats, and you'll always be able to recreate the original music CD if something ever happens to yours.

ASF

Advanced Systems Format (formerly Advanced Streaming Format, Active Streaming Format) is Microsoft's proprietary digital audio/digital video container format, especially meant for streaming media. ASF is part of the Windows Media framework. The format does not specify how (i.e. with which codec) the video or audio should be encoded; it just specifies the structure of the video/audio stream. This is similar to the function performed by the QuickTime, AVI, or Ogg container formats. One of the objectives of ASF was to support playback from digital media servers, HTTP servers, and local storage devices such as hard disk drives.

ATRAC

Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC) is a family of proprietary audio compression algorithms developed by Sony. MiniDisc was the first commercial product to incorporate ATRAC in 1992. ATRAC allowed a relatively small disc like MiniDisc to have the same running time as CD while storing audio information with minimal loss in perceptible quality. Today ATRAC is used in many Sony-branded audio players. Improvements to the codec in the form of ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus and ATRAC Advanced Lossless followed in 1999, 2002 and 2006 respectively. Other MiniDisc manufacturers such as Sharp and Panasonic also implemented their own versions of the ATRAC codec.

AU

The Au file format is a simple audio file format introduced by Sun Microsystems. The format was common on NeXT systems and on early web pages. Originally it was headerless, being simply 8-bit µ-law-encoded data at an 8000 Hz sample rate. Hardware from other vendors often used sample rates as high as 8192 Hz, often integer factors of video clock signals. Newer files have a header that consists of six 32-bit words, an optional information chunk and then the data.

AVI

AVI, which stands for Audio Video Interleave, is a Container format used by Microsoft's Video for Windows multimedia framework. Since it was developed for Windows 3.1 in 1992 it lacks some features found in newer containers like MPEG or MP4, but is still widely used by consumers and even supported by some standalone DVD players. Although still supported in Windows, and suitable for certain formats like DV, it's not a good general purpose container, and even Microsoft uses other containers for their own video formats.

Uncompressed AVI

AVI files can be created with no Compression, resulting in extremely large file sizes, but with no loss of quality from the input video to the saved file. This also requires no codecs to be installed, either for saving or playback. This is generally not recommended. Instead it's better to use a Lossless Compression format like Huffyuv.

DIVX

DivX is a brand name of products created by DivX, Inc. (formerly DivXNetworks, Inc.), including the DivX Codec which has become popular due to its ability to compress lengthy video segments into small sizes while maintaining relatively high visual quality. The DivX codec uses lossy MPEG-4 Part 2 compression, also known as MPEG-4 ASP, where quality is balanced against file size for utility. It is one of several codecs commonly associated with "ripping", whereby audio and video multimedia are transferred to a hard disk and transcoded. Many newer "DivX Certified" DVD players are able to play DivX encoded movies, although the Qpel and global motion compensation features are often omitted to reduce processing requirements. They are also excluded from the base DivX encoding profiles for compatibility reasons.

FLAC

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, a leading compression technique that preserves original audio quality while reducing file size. FLAC is an open-source, royalty-free format that has been adopted widely for its many advantages in digital audio reproduction. Compression techniques take large files such as wave (.wav) files and reduce the data bits while preserving as much of the audio landscape as possible. A well-known audio compression format is MP3 (.mp3). MP3 files slim down bulky wave and compact disk (.cda) files to a fraction of their original size, making MP3 an ideal format for portable audio players. The MP3 format allows a vast library of songs to fill a very small storage footprint. However, there is a trade-off in audio quality.

H.264

MPEG-4 Part 10, also known as MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding), is actually defined in an identical pair of standards maintained by different organizations, together known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). While MPEG-4 Part 10 is a ISO/IEC standard, it was developed in cooperation with the ITU, an organization heavily involved in broadcast television standards. Since the ITU designation for the standard is H.264, you may see MPEG-4 Part 10 video referred to as either AVC or H.264. Both are valid, and refer to the same standard.

MOV

MOV/.mov is a video Container format for QuickTime. The multimedia container file can hold multiple tracks, audio, video, effects or text files. Each Track, regardless of type, has its own digitally-encoded media stream using a specific Codec. QuickTime natively supports AIFF, WAV, DV, MP3, and MPEG-1. Including extensions, QT can also support Ogg, ASF, FLV, MKV, and DivX Media Format.

MP3

MP3 stands for MPEG-1 Audio Layer III. It is not a separate format, but a part of MPEG-1 video encoding format, developed by MPEG group in early 1990's. Too often people refer MP3 as MPEG-3, which is incorrect, because such format doesn't even exist. MPEG-1 Audio Layer III (MP3) is a method to store good quality audio into small files by using psychoacoustics in order to get rid of the data from the audio that most of the humans can't hear.

MP4

MP4 is the official multimedia container for MPEG-4 video and audio. Although such video can be stored in a number of modern containers, including MPEG-2 PS/TS and Matroska, the development of MP4 is important because it gives hobbyists a replacement for the outdated AVI container which became the standard for MPEG-4 ASP (DivX, XviD, 3IVX, etc,...) video.

OGG

Ogg is the umbrella for a group of several related multimedia and signal processing projects that are open source and royalty free. Development of these projects is controlled by Xiph.org. Ogg Vorbis a fairly new audio Compression format brought together by Xiph.org, the creator of the Ogg Container. Ogg Tarkin is a video codec currently under development by Xiph.org Foundation and it is part of the Ogg umbrella group of multimedia products.Ogg Media (OGM) is a video, audio and subtitle stream Container format. It was developed by Tobias Waldvogel and has features that common AVI formats cannot do.

RA

RealAudio is RealNetworks' proprietary audio format which ranges from low-bitrate to high-fidelity formats depending on the user's needs. Most notably, .RA, as is its file extension, is used in conjunction with RealMedia and RealVideo streaming content online. In the past it was used for Internet radio stations but has fallen out of favor recently for AAC, MP3 and WMA. RealAudio8 is a popular implementation of ATRAC3 and just one example of many audio formats used in RA.

RM

RealVideo is a streaming video format developed by RealNetworks. At one time RealVideo was a de facto standard for anime fansubs, which have been used by anime fans to distribute movies and TV shows to areas where they aren't otherwise available. RealVideo became popular because of its (then) superior quality at exceedingly low bitrates.

VOB

VOB stands for DVD Video Object. It is basically one of the core files found on DVD-Video discs and contains the actual movie data. Basically VOB file is just a basic MPEG-2 system stream -- meaning that it is a file that contains multiplexed MPEG-2 video stream, audio streams (normally AC3 and DTS formats) and subtitle streams. In order to view stand-alone VOB files, you need to have a DVD player software that supports VOB playback. A good, open source tool for this is Media Player Classic. If you wish to burn the VOB files to a standard DVDR disc, you need to have all the other standard DVD files as well, including IFO and BUP files. If you have all of the required files, you can follow this guide in order to do so with freeware tools.

FourCC

In order for Windows to play an AVI file its necessary to know what decoder on your computer should be used to render the video. AVI files all have a property called a FourCC, which consists of four letters, based on what kind of encoding is used. VfW decoders then register particular FourCCs with Windows, letting it know that they can Decode video in those formats. Some FourCCs correspond to a single application, meaning only one Codec can be used for decoding. Others, like DVSC for DV or any of the standard MPEG-4 FourCCs, can be decoded by a variety of VfW decoders that conform to those standards. The FourCC of a file can be changed with a tool called AVI FourCC Changer (see software links below).

DV

Since DV doesn't have an official container of its own most Windows software designed for working with it assumes the AVI container will be used. DV files stored in the AVI container may be of two different types - Type 1 and Type 2.