
Most popular video formats

The data shows the frequency of use of formats by users around the world and takes into account more than 3 million conversions on a PC with Windows operating system a
nd more than 450 thousand conversions on an OS X operating system.
Most video files are converted to MP4, AVI, and MOV formats.
We began collecting these statistics to better understand our users and their needs. For example, we made sure that there is a great need to save our own conversion parameters, so we continue to work on the convenience of configuration. This data also helps us to see the problems that arise with the decoding of certain files and to solve them quickly, says Anna Komarova, Product Manager of Movavi.
Among Windows PC users, a significant prevalence of MP4 and AVI formats can be noticed over all others, placing them first and second with 33% and 24%, respectively.
The MPEG-4 container, also known as MP4, was introduced by the International Organization for Standardization (IOS) in 2001 and has gained success due to its versatility: it allows you to encode both graphics and audio data, it is used to transmit video in Internet, and is compatible with most mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, and game consoles.
The AVI container, introduced by Microsoft in 1992, has been in use for more than 20 years and is still very popular, despite the many shortcomings that have long been eliminated in more modern media containers.
The next most popular formats for the Windows platform are MOV (4.41% of the total number of conversions) and WMV (3.97%). The VOB format (3.67%), which is used to encode DVD-video, closes the top five.
Named after a traditional Russian toy and often used to convert high definition (HD) videos, the Matroska container is rarely chosen by users of the Movavi video converter – 1.72% of the time. The newer WebM and OGV formats that support HTML 5 are even less popular.
The success of MP4 is also confirmed by the statistics of “paired” formats: that is, from which format users most often translate video files into. First is the conversion of AVI files to MP4 (13.96%). The reverse pair MP4 → AVI is much less common (3.85%).
The preferences of Mac users differ from those of PC owners, although MP4 is also in the lead here, and even by a wide margin from the rest of the containers. Its participation is 58.16%, while the MOV format, developed and promoted by Apple, came in second place with almost four times less score of 14.24%. The AVI format is used by “macovods” 7 times less than by PC owners.
The audio format rankings on both platforms are predictably led by the ubiquitous MP3; second place went to WAV files. Rounding out the top five are WMA, OGG, and FLAC, which provide lossless compression.
It seems that the most important factor in the popularity of a video format is its versatility. Not surprising: we see video files not only on computers, but also on DVD and Blu-ray players, smartphones, tablets, or directly on smart TVs.
It is for this reason that the classification is dominated by the MPEG-4 standard, which now works on almost all devices. We pay less attention than before to the size of the movies, the high-speed Internet access allows you to successfully transfer videos that occupy several gigabytes.















