AAC – Advanced Audio Coding
ACC is the most widely used in Apple Computers and iPod portable music players. MPEG2 ACC can produce better audio quality than MP3 using less physical space for the files.
AVI – Audio Visual Interleave
AVI is the most common format for audio/video data on a PC. Some new codecs enable AVI files to have similar or even better quality than DVD.
DivX – Digital Video Express
DivX is the name of a popular new video compression technology developed by DivX, Inc. It became popular due to its ability to compress lengthy video segments into small sizes while maintaining relatively high visual quality.
FLV, F4V – Flash Video
FLV is a preferred file format for delivering video clips via Flash, and has a decent quality-to-file size ratio.
MKV – Matroska Multimedia Container
MKV is an open standard container format. It is similar to other containers like AVI, MP4 or ASF, but is entirely open in specification.
MPEG – Motion Picture Experts Group
MPEG was the first compression standard for audio and video. It was designed to allow moving pictures and sound to be encoded into the bit rate of a CD. It is used in Video CD, SVCD, and low-quality DVD Video.
MPEG2 – Motion Picture Experts Group
MPEG2 is a generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information. MPEG2 is considered important because it has been chosen as the compression scheme for over-the-air digital television. MPEG2 is used on DVD and Blu-Ray discs, but Blu-Ray discs normally use MPEG4 for HD content.
MPEG3 – Motion Picture Experts Group
MPEG3 dealt with standardizing scalable and multi-resolution compression and was intended for HDTV compression but was found to be redundant and was merged with MPEG2. MPEG3 should not be confused with MP3, which is MPEG1 Audio Layer 3.
MPEG4 – Motion Picture Experts Group
MPEG4 is used for coding of audio-visual objects. MPEG4 uses further coding tools with additional complexity to achieve higher compression factors than MPEG2. In addition to more efficient coding of video, MPEG4 moves closer to computer graphics applications. MPEG4 is commonly used on Blu-Ray discs.
MP3 – Motion Picture Experts Group
MP3 stands for MPEG or MPEG2 Audio Layer 3. MP3 is a popular compression format used for audio files on computers and portable devices. MP3 is a good quality audio file with a small file size.
MP4 – Motion Picture Experts Group
MP4 is a new container format, which allows you to combine different multimedia streams into a single file. MP4 is streamable and supports all kinds of multimedia content.
VOB – DVD Video Object
VOB is one of the core files found on DVD-Video discs and contains multiplexed Dolby Digital Audio (normally AC3) and MPEG2 video.
3GP – Third Generation Partnership Project
The 3GP is a multimedia container format used by mobile phones. 3GP was designed to make file sizes smaller so mobile phones could support video.
OGG – OGG Vorbis
An advanced binary audio compression format similar to (but more capable than) MP3. It is patent and royalty fee, and is supported on most platforms.
WMA – Windows Media Audio
Windows Media Audio is one of the most popular interest audio formats (second to MP3), and tends to outperform MP3 in the area of sound quality.
WAV – Waveform Audio File
Developed by Microsoft and IBM, WAV audio was developed to match CD audio quality. WAV files are significantly larger than MP3 files.
