SOME DIGITAL VIDEO FILE EXTENSIONS
3gp | Global mobile phone video |
asf | MS Advanced Streaming Format |
AV1 | AOMedia Video 1 (used by Netflix) |
avi | Container for Windows Video |
divx | Licensed Mpeg-4 video |
dv | Digital video |
flv | Flash Video |
ivr | Internet Video Recording (Real) |
m2ts | Blu-Ray Disc Audio/Video (BDAV) |
m4v | Apple's container for H.264 |
mkv | Open Source Container (Matroska) |
mov | Container for Apple Video |
mp4 | Container for Mpeg-4 video * |
mpg | Mpeg-1 VHS quality video |
mpg | Mpeg-2 DVD quality video |
mts | HD Advanced Video Codec |
ProRes | Apple codec (for editing, not distribution) |
rv | Real Video (once popular for streaming) |
swf | Shockwave Flash (popular for games) |
VOB | Video Object (DVD Mpeg-2) |
vp8/9 | Google Open Codecs |
webm | vp8 or 9 Container for HTML5 |
wmv | Windows Media Video |
xvid | Open Source Mpeg-4 |
* MPEG-4 is still a developing standard, each iteration able to distribute using less bandwidth. H.264: Advanced Video Coding (AVC) is one of the most licensed for cameras. H.265: High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and H.266 Video: Versatile Video Coding (VVC) continue with compression and quality improvements, especially for streaming.
Codec stands for Compressor/Decompressor and is an algorithm for defining compression. Codecs compress your video file into a format for you to use on your computer, portable media player, DVD player, upload for streaming, etc. Some codecs come with your computer, others need to be installed.
Some codecs bury themselves within a wrapper, or container, like .avi or .mov. A container is a type of file format enclosing various types of data compressed by codecs. These formats are essentially wrappers in that they don't specify what codec is being used, but rather it defines how the video, audio and other data is stored within the container.
If you have a video file and don't know the specs, most media players have the means to identify some or all of them. The open source, cross-platform player VLC (VideoLAN) is used in the example below.
![]() Often mistaken for streaming, progressive downloading is when a media file on a remote web server is played from the server. This creates a temporary file on your machine. Depending on your connection speed, it can often take extra time for the video playback to catch up to the downloaded information in the temp file, which is called buffering. |
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