These tables compare features of multimedia container formats, most often used for storing or streaming digital video or digital audio content. To see which multimedia players support which container format, look at

comparison of media players Comparisons of media players are lists of digital media player hardware and software products that compare their features. The lists are organized by medium and other characteristics. Hardware * Comparison of portable media players, for portable ...

General information

In many ways, derived containers are similar to those on which they are based, sometimes extending them, sometimes limiting their capabilities. * QTFF ** ISO BMFF *** MP4 *** 3GPP, 3GPP2 *** F4V * MPEG-PS ** MPEG-TS *** M2TS **

VOB VOB (for video object) is the container format in DVD-Video media. VOB can contain digital video, digital audio, subtitles, DVD menus and navigation contents multiplexed together into a stream form. Files in VOB format may be encrypted. File f ...

*** EVOB * MCF ** Matroska ***

WebM WebM is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML5 video and the HTML5 audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponso ...

RIFF A riff is a repeated chord progression or refrain in music (also known as an ostinato figure in classical music); it is a pattern, or melody, often played by the rhythm section instruments or solo instrument, that forms the basis or acc ...

AVI Avi is a given name, usually masculine, often a diminutive of Avram, Avraham, etc. It is sometimes feminine and a diminutive of the Hebrew spelling of Abigail. People with the given name include: * Avi (born 1937), Newbery award-winning Americ ...

*** DMF * RM **

RMVB RealMedia Variable Bitrate (RMVB) is a variable bitrate extension of the RealMedia multimedia digital container format developed by RealNetworks. As opposed to the more common RealMedia container, which holds streaming media encoded at a consta ...

Attachments (additional files, such as fonts for subtitles) are only supported in Matroska, MP4 and QTFF. M2TS supports attachments as multiple files in a specific file structure: fonts for subtitles are in .otf files in the /BDMV/AUXDATA/ directory. Some common multimedia file formats are not completely distinct container formats. Some are containers for specific audio and video coding formats, such as

, a subset of Matroska. Some are combinations of common container formats and audio and video coding profiles, such as

AVCHD AVCHD (Advanced Video Coding High Definition) is a file-based format for the digital recording and playback of high-definition video. It is H.264 and Dolby AC-3 packaged into the MPEG transport stream, with a set of constraints designed around th ...

and DivX formats. Although sometimes compared to DivX products,

Xvid Xvid (formerly "XviD") is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 video coding standard, specifically MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP). It uses ASP features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi m ...

is neither a container format nor a video format, it is a software library that encodes video using specific coding profiles of the common MPEG-4 ASP video format. Those types of restrictions are intended to simplify the construction of multimedia recorders and players.

Video coding formats support

Some containers only support a restricted set of video formats: * DMF only supports MPEG-4 Visual ASP with DivX profiles. * EVO only supports

MPEG-4 AVC Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distr ...

, MPEG-1 Video, MPEG-2 Video and

VC-1 SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile ...

. * Ogg only supports

Theora Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg container ...

, MNG, JNG, PNG and Dirac. Firefox supports VP9 and VP8 in Ogg. VLC supports MPEG-2 Video, MPEG-4 Visual and

in Ogg. *

only supports

RealVideo RealVideo, or also spelled as Real Video, is a suite of proprietary video compression formats developed by RealNetworks – the specific format changes with the version. It was first released in 1997 and was at version 10. RealVideo is supported ...

versions RV30, RV40 and RV60. *

only supports VP9 and VP8. Support for AV1 is in development.

Audio coding formats support

Some containers only support a restricted set of audio formats: * DMF only supports MP3, AC-3, DTS and LPCM. * EVO only supports MP3, AC-3, E-AC-3, DTS, MP2,

MP1 MPEG-1 Audio Layer I, commonly abbreviated to MP1, is one of three audio formats included in the MPEG-1 standard. It is a deliberately simplified version of MPEG-1 Audio Layer II (MP2), created for applications where lower compression efficiency ...

, DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD, MLP and LPCM. * Ogg only supports Opus,

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder ( codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in con ...

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference softwa ...

A-law An A-law algorithm is a standard companding algorithm, used in European 8-bit PCM digital communications systems to optimize, i.e. modify, the dynamic range of an analog signal for digitizing. It is one of two versions of the G.711 standar ...

PCM Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form of digital audio in computers, compact discs, digital telephony and other digital audio applications. In a PCM stream, the am ...

, μ-law

, IEEE floating-point PCM, Speex and CELT. OGMtools supports MP3 and AC-3 in Ogg. *

only supports AC-3, ATRAC3,

G.728 G.728 is an ITU-T standard for speech coding operating at 16 kbit/s. It is officially described as ''Coding of speech at 16 kbit/s using low-delay code excited linear prediction''. Technology used is LD-CELP, low-delay code excited linear pre ...

AAC-LC Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is an audio coding standard for lossy digital audio compression. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves higher sound quality than MP3 encoders at the same bit rate. AAC has been standa ...

, HE-AAC v1, IS-54, Cook Codec, Sipro Lab, ACELP-NET and RealAudio Lossless. *

only supports Opus and

. Audio-only content can sometimes be placed in a simpler audio-only container, such as Native FLAC for

and ADTS for AAC.

Subtitle formats support

Some containers only support a restricted set of subtitle formats: * DMF only supports XSUB. * EVO only supports HD DVD . * Ogg only supports Ogg Kate and CMML.

SubRip SubRip is a free software program for Microsoft Windows which extracts subtitles and their timings from various video formats to a text file. It is released under the GNU GPL. Its subtitle format's file extension is .srt and is widely supported. ...

can be converted losslessly to Ogg Kate. Ogg Writ is well supported in Ogg in common tools such as OGMtools and VLC, but there's no intention to turn its draft into a fully supported specification. Xiph recommends using Kate for subtitles. MicroDVD can be converted to Ogg Writ. *

only supports RealText. SMIL can be partially converted to RealText. *

only supports WebVTT.

can be converted losslessly to WebVTT. Converting image subtitles to text formats is possible using third-party tools but relies on

optical character recognition Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a sc ...

, which is not perfectly accurate and can at best extract basic formatting. Conversion of text to images is possible while preserving content and style.

Round-trip format conversion {{noref, date=January 2019 The term round-trip is used in document conversion particularly involving markup languages such as XML and SGML The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized ma ...

between text formats may not be possible without losing some formatting features.

Overhead

Multimedia

containers A container is any receptacle or enclosure for holding a product used in storage, packaging, and transportation, including shipping. Things kept inside of a container are protected on several sides by being inside of its structure. The ter ...

interleave data in media streams to enable efficient playback using fewer computational resources, such as time spent reading from the storage drive, memory needed to buffer selected media streams, and time spent decoding when seeking to a different position in time. In this sense, muxing overhead is the control information added by the container to carry interleaved streams. A smaller overhead results in a smaller file when carrying the same streams with the same data. Overhead is affected by the total number of packets and by the size of stream packet headers. In high bitrate encodings, the content payload is usually large enough to make the overhead data relatively insignificant, but in low bitrate encodings, the inefficiency of the overhead can significantly affect the resulting file size if the container uses large stream packet headers or a large number of packets. In general, Matroska requires the least overhead, followed by MP4,

and Ogg.

Notes

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Comparison Of Container Formats Video container Formats *Comparison Video container