While you’re probably aware of the fact that there are lots of video formats out there – do you know which are the most popular? More importantly are you familiar enough with them that you know what they’re good for and why they’re used so frequently?
Developing a better understanding of video formats will let you choose the right format if you ever want to encode a video or transcode one to a different format. With that in mind there are four video formats right now that are very popular, and you should definitely know about:
- MP4 with H.264
Over the years
MP4 with H.264 has become the most popular and widely-supported format. Its
initial rise was mostly because of how versatile it was and its ability to
compress audio and video separately.
Simply put MP4
with H.264 provided smaller file sizes, was more compatible with mobile
devices, and HTML5 supported it. It is still the recommended format of choice
for most online platforms, such as indicated in YouTube’srecommended upload settings.
- MKV with H.265
Largely seen as
the would-be successor to MP4 with H.264, MKV with H.265 has strengths on
several fronts. For starters the MKV container itself is open-source and can
support practically any feature that is required – whereas the H.265 codec is
the successor to H.264 and provides better compression.
For now the
format is not as widely-supported as its predecessor, but support for it is
growing consistently. In time it could very well supplant MP4 completely.
- MPEG-2
As you may have
guessed MPEG-2 is an old format that is several generations behind MP4. However
it remains popular to this very day due to the fact that it is the format that
is used in DVDs.
Although newer
DVD players have started to support other formats (such as MP4 with H.264) the
majority still only cater to MPEG-2. In short if you want to burn a video to a
DVD, it needs to be in this format.
- AV1 codec
Recently the AV1codec was released and it has been making waves since then. It offers
better compression rates than H.265, is designed to be future-proof, and is
open-source and loyalty-free.
While still in
its early days, AV1 appears to be a legitimate challenger to H.265 and will
likely compete against it for dominance. It is expected to gain widespread
adoption over the next 2 years.
As you can see each of these formats is
popular for a different reason – or will be in the not too distant future. In
fact you may even see how you could use some of this to your advantage, for
example learning how
to convert a DVD to MP4 will help you to improve its compression.
Converting made easy
Keep in mind that newer formats are
constantly emerging with various new features and better types of compression.
It may very well be the case that in a few years a completely different format
will be more popular than any of the ones listed above.
