Revision as of 20:25, 24 January 2005

What is a container format?

A container format is a file structure to combine audio/video data, tags, menus, subtitles and some other media elements (could be seeking ability). Flexible containers can hold any type of music file, for example you could put an MP3 inside an OGG container, although that would probably just lead to confusion...

The most popular containers are: AVI (the standard Microsoft Windows container), MOV (standard Apple MacOS container), MP4 (standard container for the MPEG4 multimedia portfolio), OGG (standard container for Xiph.org codecs), ASF (standard container for Microsoft WMA and WMV) and Matroska (not really standard for any codec or system, but still popular in the digital video scene).

Some containers are exclusive to audio. Examples are WAV (Windows platform) and AIFF (MacOS platform)

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-A '''container format''' is a file format used to contain data in various formats (usually audio/video data) in a uniform manner. This makes it possible for the designers of the contained formats to pay less attention to issues like [[Metadata]] and cooperating with other formats. Examples of container formats are [[Matroska]], [[AVI]] and [[Ogg]].
+=What is a container format?=
-{{stub}}
+A container format is a file structure to combine audio/video data, tags, menus, subtitles and some other media elements (could be seeking ability). Flexible containers can hold any type of music file, for example you could put an MP3 inside an OGG container, although that would probably just lead to confusion...
+The most popular containers are: AVI (the standard Microsoft Windows container), MOV (standard Apple MacOS container), MP4 (standard container for the MPEG4 multimedia portfolio), OGG (standard container for Xiph.org codecs), ASF (standard container for Microsoft WMA and WMV) and Matroska (not really standard for any codec or system, but still popular in the digital video scene).
+Some containers are exclusive to audio. Examples are WAV (Windows platform) and AIFF (MacOS platform)
+Read more: [[MP4]], [[OGG]], [[Matroska]]