Research Guides: Converting Video Formats: Home

Welcome

Welcome to Converting Video Formats, where you'll find resources to help you understand digital video formats, and how you can convert them to suit your needs.

Identifying your needs will be the first part of the process. For example:

	If you intend to embed your video into a Powerpoint Presentation, you would be doing yourself a favor by checking Microsoft's list of acceptable video formats for Powerpoint.
	If you intend to upload your video to YouTube, your video must be under 15 minutes unless you verify your Google Account, then it can be 12 hours or 256 Gigabytes, whichever is less. Here is a list of acceptable video formats for YouTube.
	If you intend to archive your video, always try to stick with the native format in which the video was created. If you are capturing a live feed, choose the highest quality, least compressed format available.
	If you intend to author your video to DVD, it will be transcoded to MPEG-2 (.mpg) during the burning process, which has the pixel dimensions of 720x480. So if you have a higher resolution video like HD, UHD or 4K, you might consider using a Blu-ray instead.

Once you know what video format you need, this Guide aims to help you get it.