Video Formats A. List of Most Common Codecs MPEG (Moving Pictures Expert Group): Three Video Formats, MPEG 1, 2, and 4
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Video Formats A. List of Most Common Codecs MPEG (Moving Pictures Expert Group): three video formats, MPEG 1, 2, and 4. MPEG-•‐ 1: Old, supported by everything (at least up to 352x240), reasonably efficient. A good format for the web. MPEG-•‐2: A version of MPEG-•‐ 1, with better compression. 720x480. Used in HDTV, DVD , and SVCD. MPEG-•‐4: A family of codecs, some of which are open, others Microsoft proprietary. H.264: Most commonly used codecs for videos uploaded to the web. Part of the M PEG-•‐4 codec. MPEG spinoffs: mp3 (for music) and VideoCD. MJPEG (Motion JPEG): A codec consisting of a stream of JPEG ima ges. Common in video from digital cameras, and a reasonable fo rmat for editing videos, but it doesn't compress well, so it's not go od for web distribution. DV (Digital Video): Usually used for video grabbed via firewire off a video camera. Fixed at 720x480 @ 29.97FPS, or 720x576 @ 25 FPS. Not very highl y compressed. WMV (Windows Media Video): A collection of Microsoft proprietary video codecs. Since version 7, it has used a special version of MPEG4. RM (Real Media): a closed codec developed by Real Networks for streaming video and audio. DivX: in early versions, essentially an ASF (incomplete early MPEG-•‐ 4) codec inside an AVI container; DivX 4 and later are a more full M PEG-•‐4 codec…no resolution limit. Requires more horsepower to play than mpeg1, but less than mpeg2. Har d to find mac and windows players. Sorenson 3: Apple's proprietary codec, commonly used for distributing movie trailers (inside a Quicktime container). Quicktime 6: Apple's implementation of an MPEG4 codec. RP9: a very efficient streaming proprietary codec from Real (not MPEG4). WMV9: a proprietary, non-•‐MPEG4 codec from Microsoft. Ogg Theora: A relatively new open format from Xiph.org. Dirac: A very new open format under development by the BBC. B. List of Most Common Containers AVI (Audio Video Interleave): a Windows' standard multimedia con tainer. MPEG-•‐ 4 Part 14 (known as .mp4): is the standardized container for MPE G-•‐ 4. FLV (Flash Video): the format used to deliver MPEG video throu gh Flash Player. MOV: Apple's QuickTime container format. OGG, OGM & OGV: open-•‐standard containers. MKV (Mastroska): another open-•‐ specification container that you've seen if you've ever downloaded anime. VOB (DVD Video Object): It's DVD's standard container. ASF: a Microsoft format designed for WMV and WMA— files can end in .wmv or .asf Image Formats BMP (Windows BitmaP)--Windows Paint: Microsoft paint's native format. CompuServe GIF (Graphics Interchange Format): Compresses 8-bit images, and can't handle more than 256 colors. There is a loss of data inthis type of compression. It is used for online imagery, especially on the World Wide Web. There is an option to save interlaces GIFs, useful on the Web. DCS (Desktop Color Separator)--QuarkXPress: This format enables color separations of image to be printed. EPS (Encapsulated PostScript): This is a way of saving object-oriented graphics that are intended to be printed to a PostScript printing device. Many different applications use different versions of EPS, including Adobe Illustrator, FreeHand, Canvas, and CorelDraw. HAM (Hold And Modify)--Amiga: a compressed version of IFF, but the images have to conform to on of two preset sizes. IFF (Interchange File Format)--Amiga: general graphics format, serves a similat function as PICT on the Macintosh. JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group): The most effective compression technique, which can be used at different levels of compression. It subdivides the image, and averages the pixel values in each subdivision. It only saves relative differences within each of the subdivisions. This is a very effective It looks the worst on images that contain very large, sharp differences. It is useful for photographs, where the changes in value are not abrupt. LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch): A compression technique that substitutes shorter strings of data for often-repeated code describing the image. There is no loss of quality. MacPaint: A file format for MacPaint, considered to be pretty obsolete by now I guess. There is a lot of clip-art still in MacPaint. PCX (doesn't stand for anything)--PC Paintbrush: The extension assigned to images saved in PC Paintbrush's native format. Photo CD: These have their own file format supporting a YCC color model (supposed to be better than other models) but also store compressed PICT versions of each image. Photoshop Native Formats: 2.0 and 3.0. Retain all of the data, including masking channels. There is some compression in the 3.0 version, but no loss of data at all. PICT (Macintosh Picture): Native to the Macintosh system software, handles object-oriented and bit-mapped images equally well. PIXAR: format for use in PIXAR workstations, for 3D animations. Photoshop can open stills saved as PIXAR or save images as PIXAR so that they can be incorporated into 3D renderings. Supports RGB and Greyscale images. PixelPaint: There are three native formats, 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Premier Filmstrip: A format for exporting an Adobe Premier file to allow for frame- by-frame editing i9n Photoshop. RLE (Run-Length Encoding): A lossless compression for BMP files. Save some disk space without losing data. Scitex CT (Continuous Tone): A file format for use with Scitex computers for pinting and scanning. Supports Greyscale and CMYK images. TGA (Targa)--TrueVision: a format that allows you to overlay graphics onto live video. TIFF (Tag Image File Format): Widely used across different platforms. Can't handle object-oriented files, and doesn't support JPEG compression. TIFFs can be saved to be IBM or Macintosh compatible, and uses LZW compression. List of Audio File Formats Open File Formats (supported by and most likely to work with our software) wav - standard audio file format used mainly in Windows PCs. Commonly used for storing uncompressed (PCM), CD-quality sound files, which means that they can be large in size - around 10MB per minute of music. It is less well known that wave files can also be encoded with a variety of codecs to reduce the file size (for example the GSM or mp3 codecs). A list of common wave file codecs can be found here. Sample .wav file. mp3 - the MPEG Layer-3 format is the most popular format for downloading and storing music. By eliminating portions of the audio file that are essentially inaudible, mp3 files are compressed to roughly one-tenth the size of an equivalent PCM file while maintaining good audio quality. We recommend the mp3 format for music storage. It is not that good for voice storage. See here for a sample mp3 encoded wav file. Sample .mp3 file. ogg - a free, open source container format supporting a variety of codecs, the most popular of which is the audio codec Vorbis. Vorbis files are often compared to MP3 files in terms of quality. But the simple fact mp3 are so much more broadly supported makes it difficult to recommend ogg files. Sample .ogg file. gsm - designed for telephony use in Europe, gsm is a very practical format for telephone quality voice. It makes a good compromise between file size and quality. We recommend this format for voice. Note that wav files can also be encoded with the gsm codec. See here for a sample gsm encoded wav file. Sample .gsm file. dct - A variable codec format designed for dictation. It has dictation header information and can be encrypted (often required by medical confidentiality laws). See here for a list of codecs supported in dct files. The standard dct player is the Express Scribe Transcription Player. flac - a lossless compression codec. You can think of lossless compression as like zip but for audio. If you compress a PCM file to flac and then restore it again it will be a perfect copy of the original. (All the other codecs discussed here are lossy which means a small part of the quality is lost). The cost of this losslessness is that the compression ratio is not good. But we recommend flac for archiving PCM files where quality is important (eg. broadcast or music use). Sample .flac file. au - the standard audio file format used by Sun, Unix and Java. The audio in au files can be PCM or compressed with the ulaw, alaw or G729 codecs. Sample .au file. aiff - the standard audio file format used by Apple. It is like a wav file for the Mac. Sample .aif file. vox - the vox format most commonly uses the Dialogic ADPCM (Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation) codec. Similar to other ADPCM formats, it compresses to 4-bits. Vox format files are similar to wave files except that the vox files contain no information about the file itself so the codec sample rate and number of channels must first be specified in order to play a vox file. Vox a very old file type and is pretty poor. We do not recommend it for anything except for supporting legacy systems. Sample .vox file. raw - a raw file can contain audio in any codec but is usually used with PCM audio data. It is rarely used except for technical tests. Sample .raw file. Proprietary Formats (supported by our software) wma - the popular Windows Media Audio format owned by Microsoft. Designed with Digital Rights Management (DRM) abilities for copy protection. Sample .wma file. aac - the Advanced Audio Coding format is based on the MPEG4 audio standard owned by Dolby. A copy-protected version of this format has been developed by Apple for use in music downloaded from their iTunes Music Store.