What is the best digital video format?

Digital video is increasingly included in our lives, and if a few years ago users were limited to watching movies and videos on the Internet, now these same users create video content themselves, and in quantities that not even film studios Hollywood could dream. Private video clips have filled the social networks Vkontakte, Facebook and now Instagram, YouTube video hosting is packed with newly created video channels and gigabytes of video uploaded to them.

Thanks to modern devices and software, working with video has become as easy as possible: editing, pasting, layering sound, as well as converting from one format to another, all of this is now done literally in a few clicks and does not require the user has extensive knowledge of the technical part of the process itself. … Maybe yes, which requires a little excursion, then these are video formats like MP4, AVI, WMV, MOV, as well as MKV (M2TS). Next, we will talk about what a video format is and take a closer look at each of them.

What is the video format?

The video format is the structure of the video data, how it is stored on the memory card, and with which video codecs it is encrypted. Depending on the format: MP4, AVI, etc., the structure of video files may differ significantly from each other. The structure is a container for the separate storage of audio, video, and text data, as well as service metadata. Some video formats, in their structure, can store several audio or video tracks, with different quality and sound. When watching, using a video player, the user can select one or another track to play (for example, in Russian or English).

video file structure

All data, both audio and video, is encoded with special audiovisual codecs, for example AAC and H.264. Depending on the quality of the sound and video, the size of the file, as well as the resource requirements of the device on which the file is played, may change.

Let’s look at various video formats and find out which video format is better, for this we will compare video formats on three parameters: quality, processing (playback) speed, and video file size. Also, before proceeding to the comparison, it is worth noting that you can always convert videos from one format to another using Movavi Video Converter.

All video formats

AVI

The oldest presented format is a Microsoft development, supports multi-stream audio and video, can contain data encoded by various video codecs. The main advantage is video playback on low-power devices, achieved due to the low compression ratio, from which the second advantage arises – good quality. But the size of the video file leaves a lot to be desired.

Video processing speed: 8 points (high);
Video file size: 1 point (low score);
Video quality: 8 points (good).

MP4

It stands for MPEG-4 Part 14 and it is one of the most common formats. Today it is difficult to find a video device or video application that does not support this format.

Video processing speed: 6 points (average);
Video file size: 6 points (average);
Video quality is 7 points (above average), while viewing it, you may notice “apostrophes”, changes in shadows and contrast.
Overall rating of 19 points.

WMV

Another Microsoft development, the format that replaced AVI at the time, is proprietary and used only in the Windows operating system, but it is also quite widespread. The main advantages are the small file size and high video quality, while this format is quite demanding on device resources due to the high degree of data compression.

Video processing speed: 2 points (average);
Video file size: 8 points (average);
Video quality is 8 points (above average), during viewing, you may notice “apostrophes”, changes in shadows and contrast.
The total score is 18 points.

conclusion

We found out what video formats are, what they are and what they consist of, and we also examined some of them, comparing them in more detail based on three main criteria. In the benchmarks, the title of the best video format to date is MP4, with an overall rating of 19 points. Acceptable video processing speed, good quality and average video file size. Obviously, it is thanks to these qualities that this format has gained such popularity among users. So, if you have AVI video that takes up a lot of hard disk space, you can safely convert it to MP4 using Mp4Gain.