People wonder what the reason is, and why there are so many different audio formats and so many different video formats.
This whole issue of audio formats and video formats seems a great confusion. Most users are not very clear because there are so many possibilities, or which are better for their needs.
In general they are guided by what some people tell them, without actually understanding in depth about the subject, but they are simply guided by some reading, by a video from your YouTube, by someone’s comment, and so on.
What are audio formats or video formats?
The easiest way to explain it would be to say that the sound in raw form, without any kind of compression saves a lot of information so it occupies a large amount of space and also the use of the computer cpu when playing it. If you do a detailed analysis, you will realize that some of this raw data does not need to be saved either because they are redundant, because they are inaudible, etc.
Therefore a large number of organizations and companies have decided to create their codecs to be able to compress and decompress the audio and video. Precisely the term codec comes from CODify and DECodify. That is to say, each one of these organizations or companies creates its own method to encode or compress the audio or video and at the same time has a decoder to be able to listen or watch the audio or video.
Obviously each of these codex have been implemented following different paradigms, looking for different objectives, having different objectives. For example, for some codecs, compression has been the priority, that is, saving space, while others have sought to save space, but without losing quality or details in the audio or video.
Each of these codecs produces different files that can only be encoded and decoded by the specific codec of that organization or that company, this causes that file to have a different name. From there we understand that there is a great variety of options and not always one is better than the others but it depends on what we are looking for. Which of the options will work better for us. It is not the same what is appropriate for a person who wants to play music on a computer with a high quality audio card and who will use high quality speakers, which will be very different from what is appropriate for a person what will Listen to the music using a small smartphone that perhaps has low quality speakers. Therefore, it would be unnecessary to store the music in a format that will take up more space but maintain a quality that the phone is not able to play. The same applies to any device that is capable of playing music or video files, you should always use that format that saves the files in a quality that is what the device can play. That way we avoid saving poor files that have a lower quality than our device could have played, or on the contrary save files that have too much information and quality that cannot be played by the device we are going to use.
Then we will understand that those people, often extremists and their opinions about audio and video, who ensure that an audio or video format should always be used, may be exaggerating and their recommendation may not be the most optimal. Most likely, we will have to see where we are going to play that audio and depending on the Audio Response Range and the video response range it is what we end up indicating which is the most appropriate format for our need.
