Video File Formats
Video file formats can be very confusing (at least this is the way it seems to us). The technical details of the topic are beyond our range of experience, but perhaps we can provide a framework that will help. First, it is useful to think of video formats in terms of categories. One category might might include the the file types stored by the capture device and used in the editing systems. In other words, what is the file type that you would offload from your camera. What is the file format that would be the default for any editing software that you might use? The second would be the category that is output from an editing system for sharing. For example, what file formats might you want to consider when offering content online? We will focus mainly on the output category mostly because editing software tends to be tolerant of multiple input formats and the challenge to producers in most educational settings is creating a format that is accessible to end users.
Even when focusing on the output or sharing formats, we must recognize one additional level of complexity. What is being shared is multimedia (video, audio) and it is useful to differentiate the container or "wrapper" formats for this content and the content often compressed using different codecs. Common container formats include:
AVI - Microsoft
FLV - Adobe Flash
MOV - Apple Quicktime
MP4 - MPEG-4 Motion Picture Experts Group
So, for example, many now recommend MPEG-4 with the video compressed using the H-264 format. The video we offer as online resources is converted for delivery in the MOV format. Various factors go into the decision to selecting a format. For years, Flash was the most common Internet video format. However, some companies have moved away from providing the software capable of interpreting/displaying this format (e.g., the software on the Apple iPad) and providers who continue to use this format are offering content that cannot be viewed on certain devices. In many, but not all cases (e.g., the .flv format on the iPad), plugins can be downloaded to open and display different formats. Many content providers provide a link to this plugin in case viewers are unable to display the content (e.g., the .mov format we use).
Perhaps the best advise we can offer is to be aware of the categories the editing software you use makes available and try what you intend as an output file from several different computers and perhaps other devices as well.
It can also be useful to be aware of methods for converting content from one format to another. Our present suggestion would be VLC multimedia player. This open source and cross platform product both plays multiple file formats and coverts many audio and video files from one format to another.