Video formats
The term video format is also loosely interchangeable with video codec. There is a difference, but for the sake of simplicity, think of them as the same thing or at least that formats are containers that can hold different codecs.
A container is a package that stores video along with audio data. It is common for a video file format to be referred to as a container. Containers have extensions such as .mp4
, .avi
, and .mov
.
A codec is a program or software within the container that encodes and decodes the video signals. It stores the video signals and then processes those signals when a video is played.
A video container can store videos of multiple formats, although not all codecs and containers are perfectly compatible. When a video is recorded or played, a device is configured to choose appropriate codecs and containers by default, so you only need to choose the container/file format.
Uncompressed video files are extremely large, which means they are unwieldy...