Video basics

Video is the most usable container for dynamic media today. It consists of a number of frames—moving images and soundtrack—all encapsulated in a single file. In principle, each video can be represented by a sequence of separate image files for each frame and audio files for soundtracks. But using a single file is often more comfortable.

Tip

The big advantage of using a single video file is that modern video codecs can significantly reduce the video's file size compared to the size of image sequence plus the soundtrack file sizes. Also, decoding video can be made easier using GPU instead of CPU. These two reasons give a possibility to play HD videos smoothly and at high framerates with openFrameworks. Nevertheless, in Using image sequence section, we will see when using an image sequence is more suitable than using a single video file.

The best known file formats for video are AVI, MP4, and MOV. All these formats are supported in openFrameworks, but in general it is preferable to...