Een Overzicht

• .avi en .asf zijn Microsoft formaten
• .qt en .mov zijn Apple formaten
• .mpeg of .mpg universeel formaat van de toekomst

.avi en .asf

Dit zijn beide Microsoft formaten.

.qt en .mov

Dit zijn Apple QuickTime formaten.

.mpeg of .mpg

Dit is een platform onafhankelijk formaat. Het formaat met toekomst. MPEG staat voor: Motion Pictures Experts Group.

Wat is mpeg? Een familie van standaards voor het coderen van audio-visuele informatie (films, video, muziek) in difgitaal gecomprimeerd formaat. Grootste voordeel: zeer kleine bestandsgrootte met behoud van audio-visuele kwaliteit.

Er zijn verschillende soorten mpeg encoding / compressie.

• Mpeg-1
  is commonly used for video CDs (see VCD below), movie files, and MP1/MP2/MP3 audio files (see MP1/MP2/MP3 above). Mpeg-1 has small file sizes, which is why it is useful for VCDs, but the quality not great. It is almost always found in .mpg containers.
• Mpeg-2
  is what DVDs use for video (and Dolby Digital or Mpeg-2 for audio). Mpeg-2 is higher quality than mpeg-1 (literally dvd-quality), but it has much larger filesizes. It has several other container formats of its own, the most common of which is the .vob (video object) format used by DVDs.
• Mpeg-3
  was found to be redundant with Mpeg-2.
• Mpeg-4
  is for extreme compression situations, like telephony and internet movies. MPEG1 was used a lot for transmission of programming to local broadcast stations, but the Digital TV age will guarantee MPEG2 dominance for that purpose.
  Mpeg-4 is "the wave of the future". There at least 3 or 4 mpeg-4 codecs, and a good one can smoothly play very high quality video with files a fraction of the size of that of mpeg-2. The downside is that it takes a lot of processing power and/or time to encode. Mpeg-4 has its own container format, .mp4 (further contributing to the misconception that mp3 is mpeg-3).