Developed for QuickTime Player by Apple, MOV files use MPEG-4 encoding to play in QuickTime for Windows. MOV (QuickTime Movie) stores high-quality video, audio, and effects, but these files tend to be quite large. MP4 works well for videos posted on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It uses the MPEG-4 encoding algorithm to store video and audio files and text, but it offers lower definition than some others. Apple’s preferred format, MP4 can play on most other devices as well. MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) is the most common type of video file format. These are the most common digital video formats and their most frequent uses. Understand the top video file extensions. Which format you choose depends on the balance you want to strike between quality and ease of use. As with lossy audio file formats, most video formats lose data in compression. The most common codec for video compression is H.264 or AVC.Īudio file formats or file extensions are the containers or wrappers for these codecs. Then they decode that data to decompress it for viewing and editing. Codecs encode data to compress it for storing and sharing. Because video files can be large, programs called codecs were developed to make them easier to store and share.
