MP4, FLV, AVI, RMVB, MOV

Many have been the fields that have evolved to a great extent thanks to the progress of technology computing and one of these is the video. Currently, any smartphone has a photo and video camera that provides the necessary solvency to record home videos and even for professional use. But these videos must be recorded in some way, dumped to disk in a Format from file that allows them to maintain the quality of the image while occupying as little as possible.

To the algorithms that facilitate this storage and they make the videos compatible with certain physical electronic devices, they are called codecs, and just like what happens with image formats, there are several different ones.

A wide variety depending on the medium

A codec encodes - and hence the name - the video information and compresses it so that it takes up as little space as possible on the storage media. This causes that some information is always lost.

However, this loss and the resulting codec-dependent video quality are defined by the medium on which the video should be transmitted. video, since it is not the same to show a video designed to be downloaded from the Internet through our smartphone, than the movie that we can see in a

And it is that, regarding the latter, digital formats and online downloads have long reached the world of the seventh art for films that are shown in theaters.

The main codecs

Currently, and leaving aside some less used, the main video codecs that we can find are:

• MPEG-1. Perhaps the MPEG-4 that we will deal with in a moment sounds more familiar to you, but this is its first precedent, used in the Video CD standard, and which provides a quality similar to that of a domestic VHS. The codec that is responsible for encoding the audio gained fame on its own merits: MPEG-3, also known as MP3.
• MPEG-2. Evolution of the former, it is perhaps the most widespread in the industry as it is chosen for DTT (Digital Terrestrial Television) broadcasts, and cable or satellite television. In addition to this, it was also chosen for use on SVCDs and DVDs.
• MPEG-4. Widely used for online video streaming and content distribution, many cameras and mobile phones record directly in this format thanks to the fact that it is recognized by the main reproducing devices and a multitude of software.
• Avi. It is not properly a codec, if not a container file format, but what I will explain will make you understand why I add it to this list. Large companies tend to create their own standards and try to impose them. This is the case of Microsoft, which launched this format in 1992. Very flexible, it allows storing a video stream and several audio streams in the same file, each audio stream containing, for example, a different idiomatic version. The codecs of the video format and the different audios may be different, and you will need the corresponding software for each of them installed on the computer.

• DivX. Originally based on MPEG-4, it offers high compression without great quality sacrifice, making it ideal for content distribution over the Internet.


• XviD. Born as a free alternative to DivX (owned by the company of the same name), it is even more efficient than the latter, reducing the size of the resulting video file without suffering a great loss of quality, which has made it very popular among Internet users who download content from the network, as it does not require much width of band.
• WMV. Windows Media Video, as the name already suggests, was created by Microsoft for its operating system, although from here it hasn't gone much further
• FLV. Flash video, a format embedded in Flash files and intended for use online. It can have a lot of quality loss, but in general it allows the resulting file to be highly compressed, thus saving a lot of bandwidth. Historically used by YouTube, but already in decline like Adobe's Flash itself. As in the case of AVI, it is a container format, whose video can be in formats such as, for example, H.263.
• H.264 or MPEG-4 AVC. Created to have highly compressed video with the minimum possible quality loss, thus facilitating transmission through Internet of HD (High Definition) content and higher resolutions while compromising the width of the band.
• MOV. Based on MPEG-4, it is a container format -not a code- used by Apple initially for its player QuickTime multimedia that has become popular afterwards and can also be read by other programs and devices.


• RMVB. Created by RealNetworks for their software reproduction multimedia, it is a container format that has not enjoyed much success outside of the hand of Real.

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