Video Formats

[HaileyJade]

What type of file format do you perfer most when it comes to purchasing/watching videos???? :-D

1) WMV
2) MP4
3) M4V
4) AVI
5) Other

 

[JerryBoBerry]

What type of file format do you perfer most when it comes to purchasing/watching videos???? :-D

1) WMV
2) MP4
3) M4V
4) AVI
5) Other

MP4 is the best in my opinion. WMV is the worst.

The reasons are WMV is a very large file format for the quality of video. And it very often glitches out in VLC player, which is the best all around player out there. Try to skip ahead or go back in the video and you get massive black pixelation in vlc for many wmv files. Some are so horrible i'm pretty much forced to open media player, hate using windows media player.

 

[Nordling]

What type of file format do you perfer most when it comes to purchasing/watching videos???? :-D

1) WMV
2) MP4
3) M4V
4) AVI
5) Other

MP4 is the best in my opinion. WMV is the worst.

The reasons are WMV is a very large file format for the quality of video. And it very often glitches out in VLC player, which is the best all around player out there. Try to skip ahead or go back in the video and you get massive black pixelation in vlc for many wmv files. Some are so horrible i'm pretty much forced to open media player, hate using windows media player.

Agree, MP4, although as a Mac user I prefer .mov format even more, since it's native, but that's in the minority.

 

[eclipse76]

MP4 and M4V are the same thing, it's just the file extension which is different.

 

[ramblin]

The most viable "other" is MKV aka Matroska. It's good for very high definition and multiple streams.

I prefer mp4. Plays everywhere (smart TVs, tablets, etc, etc), and among the most compact for the quality.

 

[weirdbr]

I could go a bit too technical, but for brevity (since I should be in bed already) - mp4 or mkv preferably, followed by MOV and finaly followed by AVI or MPEG .. And ideally never WMV (for the reasons mentioned before. Microsoft should stay away from developing codecs/container formats).

If you stick with MP4/MKV, most programs these days pick good defaults for audio and video codecs, so the only tweaking necessary for is bitrate and it should produce files that are playable in most devices.

 

[JerryBoBerry]

Keep in mind MKV isn't an actual format you can record to. It's a container that you can put video and audio files of almost any format into. So you'd still need to record in mp4 or some other format and then use software to save that in to an mkv file. It would still be in mp4 format inside the mkv container. There's no conversion or anything going on. It's just a shell that wraps around all the various files included within.

If you're just recording a single video with single audio on it there's not much advantage to further saving it into an mkv container. It would be the same file as you started out with.

Now if a model wanted to really go for something different she could record the same scene using two camcorders, put both videos in as 'angles.' Even record alternate audio tracks, kind of like commentaries on movies. Maybe two different songs that the user can choose between when they're playing the video. Then all of those could be saved in an mkv container as a single file.

 

[UncleThursday]

MP4/M4V will also give the best compatibility across OSes. Every major PC OS, as well as iOS and Android, have players that will play those formats.

 

[weirdbr]

Keep in mind MKV isn't an actual format you can record to. It's a container that you can put video and audio files of almost any format into.

That's the part I didn't want to go into detail because it gets boring and confusing quickly. MP4 is specially confusing as hell, because people use the name 'mp4' all the time when talking about different things, because the IEC/ISO folks have a history of choosing similar names for things. I've seen it used for:
- (1) Mpeg-4 Part 10 - the video codec more popularly known as H.264
- (2) Mpeg-4 Part 3 - the audio codec known as AAC
- (3) Mpeg-4 Part 14, the actual container format that ends with .mp4, .m4a, .m4v, .m4b and can contain (among others) H.264 and AAC streams.
- (4) both the audio and video streams encoded with H.264 and AAC respectively, as in your reply when you mention 'mp4 inside mkv'.


Now, back to the matter at hand, for simplicity and support I would recommend MP4 (as defined in line 3) is the way to go simply because it's what most cameras, editing software and players support. In fact, when editing/rendering your videos just look for any encoding profiles in your software labeled as 'youtube'-ready/compatible and you are pretty likely to get a good result as those are defined directly by Google as a requirement to use the 'youtube' name in the software and are a good trade-off between size and quality; there's more details in https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171 if anyone wants to tweak their encoding software.

 

[MrRodry]

Another fan of MP4 and user of VLC Media Player.