Video file formats have over the years undergone serious changes: from the days of homemade videos to today’s modern video recording standards. Each file format does something different.
And in many cases, the format that works for one file may not necessarily work for others. Note that each format has its own set of particulars.
Before converting audio from video, you should start by learning the composition of a normal video file. Your normal video will typically comprise two main parts: the “container” and the “codec”.
The main purpose of the “codec” is to compress and decompress the videos. It comes in handy when dealing with a file that is too large to download. A good example of a codec is x264 and DivX.
A “container”, in this case, refers to the file groupings tasked with holding particulars related to that digital file. Simply put, there is a blend of two file formats—audio and video—in one file. Popular containers include MOV, AVI, and FLV.
Audio Video Interleave (AVI)
AVI was introduced in November 1992 by Microsoft Corp. as one of its Video for Windows programs. Audio Video Interleave happens to be one of the oldest formats still in use today. The fact that it is accepted around the world has made some people view it as the de facto method for storing audio and video files in a PC. AVI files have a simple architecture, which means that they can run on any operating system including Linux, Mac, and Windows.
The file format is also supported by modern web browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. AVI often stores information in a manner that allows the data to be decoded by any codec.
Flash Video Format (FLV)
Files using this format are those that have been encoded using the Adobe Flash software. In many cases, the encoding occurs through the use of VP6 or Sorenson Spark video compression formats.
You can play such videos through web browser plugins, Adobe Flash Player, or a host of other readily available third party programs. The player is one of the most popular on the web as virtually all computers users have it installed on their web browsers.
The fact that many video sharing websites, e.g., YouTube, stream their videos in Flash means that many browsers are compatible with it. Users can, thus, stream videos with ease.
Apart from being used to view online video content, many video sharing websites convert their videos into the Flash format. They begin by converting the videos from the formats applied by the users who uploaded the video content.
Conversion is recommended as it ensures that the video gets to retain its high-quality resolution after it has been compressed to produce a smaller file.
Compression guarantees that the video will load quickly without taking up too much bandwidth. Notable users of the Flash format include Hulu, Yahoo, YouTube, and VEVO.
Windows Media Video (WMV)
WMV is yet another product developed by Microsoft for use as a web streaming application. It was developed by Microsoft in response to the competition posed by RealVideo. Despite its earlier intended uses, the WMV application is today able to cater to all types of content.
WMV files also happen to be the tiniest videos you will ever find online. The size of the file is significantly decreased after compression has occurred. Compression, however, causes the resulting video to be of very poor quality.
Despite having low quality, the upside to its tiny nature is that it is one of the few file formats that users can share online via email.