Comparison of video container formats


This table compares many features of container formats. To see which multimedia players support which container format, look at comparison of media players.

General information

In many ways, derived containers are similar to those on which they are based, sometimes extending them, sometimes limiting their capabilities.
FormatFile extensionOwner or creatorLicenseVariable bit rate audioVariable frame rateChaptersMetadata / tagsInteractive menusStreamingAttachments3DHardware players
3GPP .3gp3GPP
3GPP2 .3g23GPP2
Advanced Systems Format .asf,.wmvMicrosoft
Audio Video Interleave .aviMicrosoft through RIFF chunks
DivX Media Format .divxDivX, Inc.
Enhanced VOB .evoDVD Forum
Flash Video F4V.f4vAdobe Inc.
Flash Video FLV.flvAdobe Inc.
Matroska Multimedia Container.mkv,.mk3dCoreCodec, Inc.
MPEG-4 Part 14 .mp4MPEG
MPEG-1 Video File
.mpg,.mpegMPEG
MPEG program stream .m2p,.psMPEG
MPEG transport stream .tsMPEG
BDAV MPEG-2 transport stream .m2tsBDA
Material Exchange Format .mxfSMPTE
Ogg.oggXiph.Org Foundation
QuickTime File Format .mov,.qtApple Inc.
RealMedia Variable Bitrate .rmvbRealNetworks
Video Object .vobDVD Forum
WebM.webmGoogle
FormatFile extensionOwner or creatorLicenseVariable bit rate audioVariable frame rateChaptersMetadata / tagsInteractive menusStreamingAttachments3DHardware players

Note that some common multimedia file formats are not completely distinct container formats. Some are containers for specific audio and video coding formats, such as WebM, a subset of Matroska. Some are combinations of common container formats and audio and video coding profiles, such as AVCHD and DivX formats. Although sometimes compared to DivX products, Xvid 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

FormatType3GP, 3G2ASFAVIDMFEVOFLVF4VMKVPS, TSM2TSMP4MXFOggQTFFRMVBVOBWebM
DVIntra-frame
M-JPEGIntra-frame
MJ2Intra-frame
MPEG-1 VideoLossy
MPEG-2 VideoLossy
MPEG-4 VisualLossy
Microsoft MPEG4 V2Lossy
VC-1Lossy
SorensonLossy
H.263Lossy
VP6Lossy
RealVideoLossy
CinepakLossy
IndeoLossy
TheoraLossy
MPEG-4 AVCLossy or lossless
MPEG-H HEVCLossy or lossless
DiracLossy or lossless
VP8Lossy or lossless
VP9Lossy or lossless
AV1Lossy or lossless
MVCStereoscopic
HuffYUVLossless
YCbCrNot compressed
OtherOther
ObsoleteOther
FormatType3GP, 3G2ASFAVIDMFEVOFLVF4VMKVPS, TSM2TSMP4MXFOggQTFFRMVBVOBWebM

Audio coding formats support

FormatType3GP3G2ASFAVIDMFEVOFLVF4VMKVPS, TSM2TSMP4MXFOggQTFFRMVBVOBWebM
SpeexSpeech
AMRSpeech
QCELPSpeech
G.728Speech
MP1Lossy
MP2Lossy
MP3Lossy
AACLossy
AC-3Lossy
E-AC-3Lossy
DTSLossy
WMALossy
ATRAC3Lossy
QDesign Music 1 and 2Lossy
VorbisLossy
OpusLossy
FLACLossless
ALACLossless
MLPLossless
Dolby TrueHDLossless
DTS-HDLossless
WMA LosslessLossless
ALSLossless
SLSLossless
LPCMNot compressed
μ-law PCMNot compressed
A-law PCMNot compressed
Microsoft ADPCMNot compressed
IEEE floating-point PCMNot compressed
DV AudioNot compressed
OtherOther
ObsoleteOther
FormatType3GP3G2ASFAVIDMFEVOFLVF4VMKVPS, TSM2TSMP4MXFOggQTFFRMVBVOBWebM

Subtitle/caption formats support

FormatType3GP, 3G2ASFAVIDMFEVOFLVF4VMKVPS, TSM2TSMP4MXFOggQTFFRMVBVOBWebM
VobSubPicture
DVB-SUBPicture
Picture
XSUBPicture
Ogg KatePicture or formatted text
SMILXML
USFXML
TTXTXML
SAMIHTML
SubRipFormatted text
WebVTTFormatted text
ASS, SSAFormatted text
TextSTText stream
SMPTE-TTText stream
Ogg WritText stream
MicroDVDPlain text
OthersOther
ObsoleteOther
FormatType3GP, 3G2ASFAVIDMFEVOFLVF4VMKVPS, TSM2TSMP4MXFOggQTFFRMVBVOBWebM

Note that converting image subtitles to text formats is possible using third-party tools but relies on optical character recognition, 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 between text formats may not be possible without losing some formatting features.

Overhead

Multimedia containers interleave data in media streams to enable efficient playback using less 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 offers the least overhead, followed by MP4, AVI and Ogg.