What are the Mainstream Video File Extensions?

The following will briefly demonstrate the sources and supported devices of these 5 video formats.

FLV (Flash Video), is an online video format, used by many online video websites. All major operating systems, including Windows system, are attached a Flash Player. Some of the major players can play FLV videos.

Taking the advantage of cross-platform, videos in FLV are popular and supported by almost all websites and browsers, including YouTube, Google Video, Niconico and Youku, etc. Flash supports both streaming and progressive download, all those downloaded files take up little storage space. However, because of its worrying security, many major browsers have gradually forbidden playing FLV in default.

AVI (Audio Video Interleave), is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft. Because Windows system is widely adopted, this kind of video file format is well supported. It would not be a problem to play AVI files. AVI video file extensions can be applied to multiple types of codec, and this kind of files include both audio and video file. M-JPEG or DivX is the most common codec.

AVI can be used in any Windows system and applied primarily to CD for saving image information such as TV and movies.

MOV format was first developed by Apple and its default player is QuickTimePlayer. The multimedia file format extensions of QuickTime is “.mov”. The biggest feature of MOV is cross-platform, supporting both MacOS and Windows system. This format can store audio and video information with small storage space requirement. It adopts MOV format file with lossy compression method, so it has better graphic effect than AVI format.

MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) is a standard digital multimedia format with extensions “.mp4”. MP4 format is most commonly used to store digital audio and digital video, and apply primarily to online video, disk, video call and TV broadcast. There are lots of players and operating systems support MP4 format such as iPhone, Android and PC.

WMV (Windows Media Video) is a series of video codecs and corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It was firstly designed for Internet streaming media application.

WMV video can only be played on Windows devices, or you have to install additional module on your devices. Therefore, in order to play videos in WMV format, you have to install a player which supports WMV format, or convert WMV format to other video file formats.

Because different player has different decoder, videos won’t be played in a player which can not decode certain formats, no matter it is a computer, mobile phone or MP4 player. Thus, the best solution is to convert video formats, for example, to MP4 format. MP4 format is the international standard video format and supports multiple equipment and operating systems.