MOV, WMV, AVI, MPEG, MP3, OGG, WMA, Media Formats Explained. Like my Top 13 things not to do page, this page is mainly intended to vent my irritation. C C Programmiersprache IT C Country X. Adressierung, Land IT C Kohlenstoff Chemisches Element C Kollektor Transistor Elektronik C privater Konsum. A tetra P adenosine tetraphosphate aGBT abungarotoxin aGD aglycerophosphate dehydrogenase aglob aglobulin ALM acetylkitasamycin. Webopedias list of Data File Formats and File Extensions makes it easy to look through thousands of extensions and file formats to find what you need. Meet the AVI Video Codecs The video data in an AVI file can be formatted and compressed in a variety of ways. Video for Windows 1. Hz34cm100Hz3. 4m 100Hz. From version 1. 0. FLAC and OggVorbis. Some of the file formats I am also interested in adding are Kurzweil K2000 sampler files. News October 15th, 2017, FFmpeg 3. Cantor FFmpeg 3. 4 Cantor, a new major release, is now available Some of the highlights deflicker video filter. FFmpeg-Libav.png' alt='11 Adpcm Codec Ima Intel' title='11 Adpcm Codec Ima Intel' />Media Formats Explained. Like my Top 1. 3 things not to do page, this page is mainly intended to vent my irritation towards things that bother me on the internet. The topic of today is multimedia formats and the lack of knowledge thereabout by the average person. Many people do not know the difference between a container format and a codec. Other people have some mostly unjustified hatred against certain media formats and try to justify this hatred with pseudo knowledge when bashing those formats on forums and newsgroups. This hatred is often rooted in ignorance about the subject in question. Instead of descending to the same level as those people and insulting them on the same forums and newsgroups, I will now try to give a shot at re education. This article was written around the year 2. Although the first parts are general and will always be applicable, the information about specific containers, codecs and media players is starting to become dated e. WMV codecs are not as closed and proprietary as the ones at the time this article was written, etc. I gave up on keeping the page updated with information about the latest new codecs, therefore you may want to look elsewhere if you want to have the most up to date information. Because this text is quite long, heres a summary. A media file like a. MOV,. AVI or. WMV, is a container file. If youre talking about a format, you are actually talking about the container format. A container file specifies how the data streams inside it are organized, but doesnt say anything about how the actual data is represented. This is the task of the codecs. A codec describes how video or audio data is to be compressed and decompressed. Theoretically, you can use any codec inside any container format. However, codecs are traditionally licensed exclusively to a certain format. For instance, the Sorenson codec is only found in Quick. Time files and WMV video is only used in Windows Media files. Many people dont know the difference between formats and codecs, hence think that. Quick. Time files use the infamous Sorenson codec and are a pain in the ass to play. Or, they think that AVI files will always be good quality because they would use the DIVX codec. There is no ideal format for all situations. Some formats are easier to use on certain platforms, some are nearly impossible to use. If you need to embed movies in your website, the best way to deal with this problem is to give the user a choice between several different formats. Container formats vs. The most common mistake people make, is confusing container formats with codecs. Many people hate Quick. Time, but in fact what theyre actually hating is the Sorenson codec, even though they dont even know what it is. Other people think AVI is a great format because it delivers good quality. I can make you an AVI that will make you puke. And other people wonder why one AVI or MOV plays fine on their computer while another one gives no image or sound. When you download an AVI, MOV or WMV movie, youre downloading a container file. As the name says, it is a file which contains something else. In the specifications for MOV or AVI files, you will find nothing about how to store, compress or decompress actual video or audio data. The only thing these files do, is providing a wrapper around data streams. When talking about a format, youre talking about the structure of a container file. So saying that the AVI format has good video compression is nonsense, because the format has nothing to do with how the video is compressed. Inside those container files, there are one or more data streams. The most common files have one video stream and one audio stream, but in more advanced formats like Quick. Time, there can be any amount and type of streams. Any container that is designed for streaming either from a sequential medium like a DVD, or the internet will interleave the streams in chunks. This ensures that data that belongs together temporally, e. Again, the format specifications only say how these streams are to be included in the file, not whats in the streams themselves. This is where the codecs come into play. In almost all cases, video and audio data will be compressed, which means it will be stored in a way that takes less space than if the data would simply be represented in raw form. The compression scheme will typically be specified by the codec and is often an integral part of it. A simple codec could take a raw stream of data and send it through a compression scheme like ZIP, but most practical codecs will try to do something more advanced. Compression schemes are divided into two categories a codec that preserves the original data with perfect accuracy is called a lossless codec, a codec that is unable to perfectly reconstruct the original data is called a lossy codec. Lossy codecs are designed such that they degrade the signal in a way that is minimally visible or audible. They do this by throwing away data that is the least noticeable according to a so called psychoacoustic or psychovisual model. A short list of the most common container formats, the file extensions they use, and a bit of history. Quick. Time. MOV,. QT this was the first real successful multimedia format, introduced by Apple Computer, and it dates back to 1. The first versions were only available for Mac OS but a Windows version soon followed. From the start on, Quick. Time was quite advanced, with support for any amount of streams and multi segmented files. Editing a movie is simple and intuitive. Later versions even allowed scripting and interactive features. I remember viewing albeit very short movies of Apollo launches and a heap of camel bones fusing into a skeleton, while on a PC the most exciting thing one could do was watching an animated GIF. Video for Windows. AVI of course Microsoft had to make a clone1a of Quick. Time as soon as possible, and they managed to do it within one year. Maybe this is why the original Vf. W specification was such a braindead format. It didnt have most of the advanced features Quick. Time has. The format was extended by the Open. DML group to tackle some limitations of the original specification. Later on, MS dropped support for AVI in favour of their new WMV format. One reason was that Vf. W was not a big success. The main reason however was probably because AVI had become the format of choice for pirated movies maybe due to the link between the simplicity of the format and the simplicity of the average teenage scriptkiddie pirate. Arrrr. Technically however, those movies are not AVI files because Microsofts Vf. W specification doesnt allow the use of the typical pirate codecs. Div. X. DIVX at the time of this writing, this format is totally identical to AVI, at least the kind of unofficial AVI with the non standard codecs. This is also the reason why the company which produces the now legal Div. X codec has changed the file extension. Although Microsoft abandoned AVI, they still dont like it to be associated with pirated movies. Mind that due to this name change theres now a Div. X format and a Div. X codec. Real. Video. RM this was one of the first more succesful competitors for Quick. Time, although it never really became very popular either, probably due to the fact that initially it could only be played in the extremely proprietary Real. Player. There is also an audio only variant called Real. Audio. RA,. RAM. Windows Media. WMV,. History. Similar or Related Projects. News. Development. Programming Interface. Bug Reporting. Download. FAQ. Mailing Lists. Change Log. Licensing Information. Libsndfile is a C library for reading and writing files containing sampled sound. MS Windows WAV and the AppleSGI AIFF format through one standard. It is released in source code format under the. Gnu Lesser General Public License. The library was written to compile and run on a Linux system but should compile. Unix including Mac. OS X. There are also pre compiled binaries available for 3. It was designed to handle both little endian such as WAV and big endian. AIFF data, and to compile and run correctly on little endian such as Intel. DECCompaq Alpha processor systems as well as big endian processor systems such. Motorola 6. 8k, Power PC, MIPS and Sparc. Hopefully the design of the library will also make it easy to extend for reading and. It has been compiled and tested at one time or another on the following systems. Every platform supported by Debian GNULinux including x. Mac OS X 1. 0. 3sparc sun solaris. QNX 6. 0i. 38. 6 unknown openbsd. At the moment, each new release is being tested on i. Linux, x. 866. 4 Linux. Power. PC Linux, Win. Win. 64. libsndfile has the following main features. Ability to read and write a large number of file formats. A simple, elegant and easy to use Applications Programming Interface. Usable on Unix, Win. Mac. OS and others. On the fly format conversion, including endian ness swapping, type conversion. Optional normalisation when reading floating point data from files containing. Ability to open files in readwrite mode. The ability to write the file header without closing the file only on files. Ability to query the library about all supported formats and retrieve text. When new bugs are found, new tests are added to the test suite to ensure that. When new features are added, tests are added to the test suite to make sure that. The following table lists the file formats and encodings that libsndfile can read. The file formats are arranged across the top and encodings along the left. Micro soft. WAVSGI Apple. AIFF AIFCSun DEC Ne. XTAU SNDHeader less. RAWParis Audio. File. PAFCommo dore. Amiga. IFF SVXSphere. Nist. WAVIRCAMSFCreative. VOCSound forge. W6. GNU Octave 2. 0. MAT4. GNU Octave 2. 1. MAT5. Portable Voice Format. PVFFasttracker 2. XIHMM Tool Kit. HTKApple. CAFSound. Designer IISD2. Free Lossless Audio Codec. FLACUnsigned 8 bit PCMRWRW RW    RWRW RW      Signed 8 bit PCM RWRWRWRWRWRW     RW  RWRWRWSigned 1. PCMRWRWRWRWRWRWRWRWRWRWRWRWRW RWRWRWRWSigned 2. PCMRWRWRWRWRW RWRW RW     RWRWRWSigned 3. PCMRWRWRWRW  RWRW RWRWRWRW  RW  3. RWRWRWRW   RW RWRWRW   RW  6. RWRWRWRW     RWRWRW   RW  u law encoding. RWRWRWRW  RWRWRWRW     RW  A law encoding. RWRWRWRW  RWRWRWRW     RW  IMA ADPCMRW        RW        MS ADPCMRW        RW        GSM 6. RWRW RW     RW        G7. ADPCM 3. 2kbps. RW RW               G7. ADPCM 2. 4kbps  RW               G7. ADPCM 4. 0kbps  RW               1. DWVW RW RW              1. DWVW RW RW              2. DWVW RW RW              Ok Dialogic ADPCM   RW              8 bit DPCM             RW    1. DPCM             RW. From version 1. 0. Some of the file formats I am also interested in adding are. Kurzweil K2. 00. 0 sampler files. I have decided that I will not be adding support for MPEG Layer 3 commonly. MP3 due to the patent issues surrounding this file format. Other file formats may also be added on request. My first attempt at reading and writing WAV files was in 1. Windows. I started using Linux in early 1. That contributed code would eventually mutate into this library. As one of my interests is Digital Signal Processing DSP I decided that as well as. DSP applications. It then dawned on me that whatever file format anything from 8 bit unsigned chars. For example, in a sound playback program, the library caller typically wants the sound. Microsofts WAVEFORMATIEEEFLOAT. Another example would be someone doing speech recognition research who has recorded. WAV file but wants to process it as double precision floating. Here is the release history for libsndfile. Version 0. 0. 8 Feb 1. First official release. Version 0. 0. 2. 8 Apr 2. Final release of version 0 of libsndfile. Version 1. 0. 0rc. Jun 2. 4 2. 00. 2 Release candidate 1 of version 1 of libsndfile. Version 1. 0. 0rc. Aug 1. 4 2. 00. 2 Mac. OS 9 fixes. Version 1. Aug 1. 6 2. 00. 2 First 1. X release. Version 1. Sep 1. 4 2. 00. 2 Added MAT4 and MAT5 file formats. Version 1. 0. 2 Nov 2. Added VOX ADPCM format. Version 1. 0. 3 Dec 0. Fixes for Linux on ia. CPUs. Version 1. 0. Feb 0. 2 2. 00. 3 New file formats and functionality. Version 1. 0. 5 May 0. One new file format and new functionality. Version 1. 0. 6 Feb 0. Large file fix for LinuxSolaris, new functionality. Win. 32 improvements. Version 1. 0. 7 Feb 2. Fix build problems on Mac. Sade The Ultimate Collection Rar more. OS X and fix ia. 64MIPS etc. Version 1. 0. 8 Mar 1. Minor bug fixes. Version 1. Mar 3. 0 2. 00. 4 Add AVR format. Improve handling of some WAV files. Version 1. 0. 1. 0 Jun 1. Minor bug fixes. Fix support for Win. Min. GW compiler. Version 1. 0. 1. 1 Nov 1. Add SD2 file support, reading of loop data in WAV and AIFF. Minor bug fixes. Version 1. Sep 3. 0 2. 00. 5 Add FLAC and CAF file support, virtual IO interface. Minor bug fixes and cleanups. Version 1. 0. 1. 3 Jan 2. Add readwrite of instrument chunks. Minor bug fixes. Version 1. Feb 1. 9 2. 00. 6 Minor bug fixes. Start shipping windows binarysource ZIP. Version 1. 0. 1. 5 Mar 1. Minor bug fixes. Version 1. Apr 3. 0 2. 00. 6 Add support for RIFX. Other minor feature enhancements and. Version 1. 0. 1. 7 Aug 3. Add C wrapper sndfile. Minor bug fixes and cleanups. Version 1. 0. 1. 8 Feb 0. Add OggVorbis suppport, remove captive libraries, many. Generate Win. 32 and Win. Version 1. 0. 1. 9 Mar 0. Fix for CVE 2. 00. Huge number of minor fixes as a. Version 1. 0. 2. 0 May 1. Fix for potential heap overflow. Version 1. 0. 2. 1 December 1. Bunch of minor bug fixes. Version 1. 0. 2. 2 October 0. Bunch of minor bug fixes. Version 1. 0. 2. 3 October 1. Minor bug fixes. Version 1. March 2. 3 2. 01. Minor bug fixes. Version 1. July 1. 3 2. 01. 1 Fix for Secunia Advisory SA4. Minor bug fixes and. Version 1. 0. 2. 6 November 2. Fix for CVE 2. 01. CVE 2. 01. 4 9. CVE 2. Add ALACCAF support. Minor bug fixes and improvements. Version 1. 0. 2. 7 June 1. Fix a seek regression in 1. Add metadata readwrite. CAF and RF6. 4. FIx PAF endian ness issue. Version 1. 0. 2. 8 April 2 2. Fix buffer overruns in FLAC and ID3 handling code. Reduce default. header memory requirements. Fix detection of Large File Support for 3. Similar or Related Projects. So. X is a program for. Wavplay started out. WAV file player under Linux and has mutated into Gnuwave, a clientserver. Audiofile libaudiofile is. The. author Michael Pruett has set out to clone and fix some bugs in the libaudiofile. SGIs IRIX OS. sndlib. Bill Schottstaedt of CCRMA. GNU Lesser General Public License. To maximise the compatibility of libsndfile, the user may choose to use libsndfile. You can also read a simple explanation of the ideas behind the GPL and the LGPL. You can use libsndfile with. Free Software. proprietary, shareware or other closed source applications as long as libsndfile. LGPL for more info.