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Audio&Video Glossary
Audio & Video formats Glossary
| WMA | MP4 | MOV | VOB | MP3 |
| WMV | M4A | OGG | AVI | 3GP |
| WAV | M4B | AC3 | FLV | APE |
| AAC | M4V | M4P | ASF | MKV |
WMA - is Microsoft's main audio format and is available in both lossy and lossless variations. The lossy version is most used and with DRM stuck to it.
Players Supported: Zune, Creative Zen, Blackberry, Cowon, iRiver, Archos, PSP
Converter Available: Youtube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder
WMV - Windows Media Video, normally use the ASF container and the files end in either .wmv or .asf. The file ending is irrelevant and you could rename asf to wmv and it would still work. WMV is a group of codecs just like MPEG-4.
Players Supported: Zune, Creative Zen, PSP, Blackberry, Archos, Cowon, iRiver
Converter Available:Youtube Downloader;Streaming Video Recorder
MOV - the QuickTime (.mov) file format functions as a multimedia container file that contains one or more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of data: audio, video, effects, or text (e.g. for subtitles).
Players Supported: iPod, iPhone, Zune, Blackberry
Converter Available:Youtube Downloader;Streaming Video Recorder
MP4 - MPEG-4 Part 14, is a multimedia container format standard specified as a part of MPEG-4, most commonly used to store digital audio and digital video streams, official filename extension is .mp4.
Audio-only MPEG-4 files generally have .m4a extension.
Audio book and podcast files more commonly use the .m4b extension.
The Apple iPhone uses MPEG-4 audio for its ringtones but uses the .m4r extension.
MPEG-4 files with audio streams encrypted by FairPlay Digital Rights Management as sold through the iTunes
Store use the .m4p extension.
The common but non-standard use of the extensions .m4a is due to the popularity of Apple's iPod, iPhone, and
iTunes Store, and Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Zune. Without mods, Sony's PSP can also play m4a. m4a generally delivers better audio quality than the older MP3 format at the same bit rate.
Players Supported: iPod, Zune（except Zune30）, Creative Zen, Blackberry, Archos, PSP, Cowon, iRiver
Converter Available:Youtube Downloader;Streaming Video Recorder
AAC - Stands for Advanced Audio Coder, is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format it has better sound quality and smaller size than MP3. Many mobile devices support AAC format like SonyEricsson's W890i, Sony's Walkman, Apple's iPhone, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, BenQ-Siemens and Philips, BlackBerry, Nintendo's Wii, Creative Zen Portable, Microsoft Zune, (PSP) with firmware 2.0 or greater. An audio-encoding standard for MPEG-2 that is not backward, compatible with MPEG-1 audio.
Players Supported: iPod, iPhone, Zune, Creative Zen, Archos, PSP, Blackberry
Downloader Available: YouTube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder
AC3 - (Dolby Digital ac-3) is the common version containing up to six discrete channels of sound, with five channels for normal-range speakers (20 Hz – 20,000 Hz) (right front, center, left front, right rear and left rear) and one channel (20 Hz – 120 Hz) for the subwoofer driven low-frequency effects like explosion and hammerblow. Batman Returns was the first film to use Dolby Digital technology.
Players Supported: Zune, Archos, CowonDownloader Available: YouTube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder
MKV - Matroska, the extensible open standard Audio/Video container that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks inside a single fileMatroska, usually found as .mkv files (matroska video) and .mka files (matroska audio).
Players Supported: Cowon
Converter Available:Youtube Downloader;Streaming Video Recorder
WMV - Windows Media Video, normally use the ASF container and the files end in either .wmv or .asf. The file ending is irrelevant and you could rename asf to wmv and it would still work. WMV is a group of codecs just like MPEG-4.
Players Supported: Zune, Creative Zen, PSP, Blackberry, Archos, Cowon, iRiverDownloader Available: YouTube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder
APE - (monkey's audio) A file with the extension .ape, is an audio file compressed using Monkey's Audio. Monkey's Audio is a lossless compression, which means it does not permanently discard data during compression. It achieves compression rates of around 40%. Since it is lossless, the quality of the audio after compression will be the exact same. And we can only convert the CD and uncompressed WAV to APE for the moment, MP3 is not available. Officially, Monkey's Audio is only available for the Microsoft Windows platform.
Players Supported: Zune, Cowon, iRiverDownloader Available: YouTube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder
VOB - (Video Object) is a container format contained in DVD-Video media. VOB is based on MPEG-2 program stream format, contains the actual Video, Audio, Subtitle, and Menu contents in stream form
Players Supported: iPod, Zune, Creative Zen, Archos, PSP, Cowon
Bit Rate - Bitrate or Bit rate is the average number of bits that one second of video or audio data will consume. Higher bitrate means bigger file size and generally better video or audio quality while lower bitrate means lower file size but worse video or audio quality. Some bitrate examples in common video and audio files:
MP3 about 128 kbps (kilobits per second)
VCD about 1374 kbps
DVD about 4500 kbps
DV about 25 Mbps (megabits per second)
Encoder - An encoder is a device used to change a signal (such as a bitstream) or data into a code. The code may serve any of a number of purposes such as compressing information for transmission or storage, encrypting or adding redundancies to the input code, or translating from one code to another.
M4A - The audio file format used by Apple in their popular iTunes Music Store often appears on your system with the ".M4A" filename extension. M4A can produce better audio quality than MP3 using less physical space for the files.
Players Supported: iPod, iPhone, Zune, Creative ZenDownloader Available: YouTube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder ;Streaming Audio Recorder
MP3 - is an acronym for MPEG-1 (or MPEG-2) Layer 3 audio encoding (it is not an acronym for MPEG-3). MP3 is a popular compression format used for audio files on computers and portable devices.
Players Supported: iPod, iPhone, Zune, PSP, Creative Zen, Blackberry, Archos, Cowon, iriverDownloader Available: YouTube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder ; Streaming Audio Recorder
AVI - Audio Video Interleave, known by its acronym AVI, is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback.
Players Supported: Zune, PSP, Blackberry, CowonDownloader Available: YouTube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder
3GP -Mobile phones use 3GP, a simplified version of MPEG-4 Part 12 with the .3gp and .3g2 extensions. (for GSM-based Phones, may have filename extension .3gp，for CDMA-based Phones, may have filename extension .3g2)
Downloader Available: YouTube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder
MOV - the QuickTime (.mov) file format functions as a multimedia container file that contains one or more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of data: audio, video, effects, or text (e.g. for subtitles).
Players Supported: iPod, iPhone, Zune, Blackberry
Downloader Available: YouTube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder
M4V -raw MPEG-4 Visual bit streams, named .m4v, is a standard file format for the popular Apple iPod devices. Another definition is that download videos from the iTunes store are in m4v format, along with videos that are converted in iTunes.
Downloader Available: YouTube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder
ASF -Advanced Systems Format, is Microsoft's proprietary digital audio/video container format, especially meant for streaming media. asf is part of the Windows Media framework.
Downloader Available: YouTube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder
OGG - OGG Theora is the video compression codec part of the ogg multimedia project. It is based on On2's VP3 codec, but On2 has released it now under a BSD type license and renounced its patents, so it is now free and open source. A final release is due out in early summer 2003. Ogg is the name of an open source multimedia project maintained by the xiph.org foundation. OGG Vorbis refers to the lessee general purpose audio compression format that surpasses mp3 in quality and rivals new formats such as AAC and TwinVQ (a.k.a. VQF).
Players Supported: Zune, Cowon, iRiverDownloader Available: YouTube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder
Sample rate - The sample rate, or sampling frequency defines the number of samples per second(or per other unit) taken from a continuous signal to make a discrete signal. For time-domain signals, it can be measured in hertz(Hz). The inverse of the sampling frequency is the sampling period or sampling interval, which is the time between samples.
WAV - (WAVE), short for Waveform audio format, is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing audio on PCs. It is the main format used on Windows systems for raw audio. The most common WAV format contains uncompressed audio and uncompressed WAV files are quite large in size, so, it has declined in popularity. WAV files are probably the simplest of the common formats for storing audio samples. Unlike MPEG audio and other compressed formats, WAVs store samples "in the raw" where no pre-processing is required other that formatting of the data. The WAV file itself consists of three "chunks" of information: The RIFF chunk which identifies the file as a WAV file, The FORMAT chunk which identifies parameters such as sample rate and the DATA chunk which contains the actual data (samples).
Players Supported: iPod, iPhone, Creative Zen, PSP, Blackberry, Cowon, iriverDownloader Available: YouTube Downloader Streaming Video Recorder
WMA - (Windows Media Audio) is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. It can be played by Windows Media player, RealPlayer, Winamp, Windows Movie Maker, and the Microsoft Zune media management software supports most WMA codec. Its audio quality is better than mp3 when the bitstream is below 128kbps, but won't get much improvement when the bitstream gets higher.
Players Supported: Zune, Creative Zen, Blackberry, Cowon, iRiver, Archos, PSP
Downloader Available: YouTube Downloader; Streaming Video Recorder
