Video container file formats

A container is the file around the video. It holds one or more tracks, usually a video stream and an audio stream and sometimes subtitles, cut into pieces and interleaved with the timing a player needs to keep them in step. The same container can carry many different codecs.

Formats

.3GP

3GPP multimedia file

Mobile phone video from the 3G era, built on the same boxes as MP4.

.AVI

Audio Video Interleave

Microsoft’s RIFF video container from 1992, with interleaved chunks and an index.

.FLV

Flash Video

The video file of Flash Player: a short header then timestamped audio and video tags.

.MKV

Matroska video

An open container for any number of tracks, built on EBML elements.

.MOV

QuickTime movie

Apple’s QuickTime container: tracks and sample tables in nested atoms.

.MP4

MPEG-4 Part 14

The most common video file: tracks and sample tables in nested boxes.

.MPG

MPEG program stream

MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video and audio in packs, as on Video CDs and DVDs.

.TS

MPEG transport stream

The broadcast TV container: 188-byte packets tagged with stream IDs.

.WEBM

WebM video

Open web video: Matroska restricted to VP8, VP9 or AV1 with Vorbis or Opus.

.WMV

Windows Media Video

Microsoft’s Windows Media video, in GUID-tagged ASF objects.