From the same family, Vorbis (the audio codec compared to MP3, a.k.a.OGG) is very good but also very not popular. They were created as part of the Xiph initiative for a complete open source patent-free multimedia framework, but seems nobody uses it anymore for video. OGG or OGM (the container file format) is practically dead in my opinion. So today I store my videos in the most feature rich and well supported by players format: MKV. No transcoding (decoding followed by a lossy encoding into another format) is needed. Since MKV is just a container, the large video, audio etc streams can be extracted and repackaged into MP4 and vice-versa in seconds. But this doesn’t really matter, and I’ll explain why. Meanwhile, MKV wins everything but on the Industry Support category. They just use to be different extensions to help user’s eyes easily identify whats inside. MP5 and MP6 (used to classify portable media players) are things that simply doesn’t exist in the multimedia scene.MP4 is an ISO standard and the increasing industry support can be felt on iPods and portable devices, and most notable on home DVD players capable of playing the 700MB MP4 video file burned in a CD. Personally I believe MP4 is the multimedia file format for the future because since it is getting popular, all these non–standardized features will get stabilized. I recommend the LongTail FLV/MP4 Player since it also plays subtitles embedded in MP4 files. The popular Flash Player that is installed on everybody’s browser supports playing MP4 files as long as they contain H.264 video and AAC audio tracks. Ready for popular web streaming as in Flash player Yes (see GPAC), with some intellectual property issues. Supported by free and Open Source multiplatform authoring tools The container overhead in bytes in the final file Yes through SVG, but unsupported by most players Yes through an XML idiom, but unsupported by most players Support for carrying menus information (as in DVDs) and interaction Support for naming tracks with human names as “Director’s comments” or “Portuguese subtitles” etc VobSub (as extracted from DVDs), plain timed UTF-8 text (SRT, SUB) etc Support for multiple language embedded soft-subtitles Support for attachments with mime-types (used to attach movie posters images or other files) Support for tags (artist, title, composer, etc as MP3’s ID3)Ĭan be supported by MP4 extensibility but this is not very well standardized across authoring tools (iTunes, GPAC etc) and players (Amarok, Media Player Classic, iPod, Windows Media Player etc) Formats are only MP3, AAC and a few others not very popular Support for multiple audio tracks (channels, formats, languages and “director’s comments”) MPEG-4 ASP (DivX, Xvid), MPEG-4 AVC (a.k.a. Support for advanced video formats and multiple video angles Very popular on HD or high quality DVD rips, supported by Flash Player, YouTube, Google Video Very popular on HD or high quality DVD rips Good and increasing, specially on Apple platforms, the mobile scene and Nero Digital ecosystem This is a comparison of all these file formats based on my personal experience with them ( a more formal comparison can be found in Wikipedia): And this is exactly what modern file formats as MP4 and MKV do: they carry all your movie-related data together. Subtitle track: Portuguese (Unicode text)Ī digital multimedia file format must be capable to contain all this different medias and multiplex them in parallel so you won’t have the video in the first 500MB of the file and the audio on the following 500MB (this can’t work for streaming). Video segment showing another angle (MPEG-4 ASP/Xvid/DivX)Īudio track: English Dolby Surround 5.1 (AC3)Īudio track: Director’s comments stereo (MP3)Īudio track: Portuguese Dolby Surround 5.1 (DTS) So this is a graphical view of how things are organized inside a 900MB movie file in a modern format as MKV or MP4: Header with tags, track names, chapters info, seek positionsĪttachments as JPG images, documents, scripts or text files “Multimedia” has this name because you have multiple types of media: video in multiple angles, multiple audio options including different languages and channels (stereo, 5.1, 6 channels etc), subtitles in several languages, chapter information, menu etc. Video quality depends on what goes inside it. OGG, MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14), MKV (Matroska), AVI, WMV (or ASF) are just containers, envelopes. AVI or vice-verse (or any other combination of comparisons). The ripped video file format is a decision you must make. Some friends asked so the following is how I encode (rip) DVDs.
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