Some Digital A/V Formats

Peter Bubestinger-Steindl
(peter @ ArkThis.com)

April 2022

Which digital AV formats…

  • do you know?
  • do you use?
  • would you like to know more about?

Digital Video Trinity

A Quick Peek

MediaInfo’s “Easy” view

Containers

  • AVI: Audio Video Interleave
  • MOV: Quicktime
  • MKV: Matroska Video
  • MXF: Material eXchange Format
  • MPG, MTS: MPEG Transport Stream
  • WAV / RIFF (audio)
  • …

Video Codecs

  • H.264 (lossy, lossless, uncompressed)
  • H.265 (lossy, lossless)
  • MPEG-2 lossy (aka: IMX, XDCAM, DVD, HDV )
  • ProRes (lossy)
  • FFV1 (lossless)
  • Motion JPEG2000 (J2K) (lossy, lossless)
  • Uncompressed (v210, RGB, DPX, …)
  • WMV (Windows Media Video)
  • …

Audio Codecs

  • AAC Advanced Audio Coding
  • MP3 MPEG-1/2 Audio Layer III
  • Opus
  • PCM Pulse Code Modulation
  • FLAC Free Lossless Audio Codec
  • WMA (Windows Media Audio)
  • …

Default Formats: Video

  • Image: Default = lossy encoding
  • Audio: production = PCM, consumer = AAC
  • Metadata: Often embedded. Sometimes sidecar.
  • Container: A video container file format.

Default Formats: Film

  • Image: DPX / TIFF files
  • Audio: PCM in WAV
  • Metadata: Mostly sidecar, some MD in image files.
  • Container: Filesystem folder structure.

A/V Formats: Good practices for DLTP

  • Capture digital tape in its native format without generation loss (MiniDV, DAT, etc.)

  • Store born-digital files “as original” as possible.

  • Audio preservation format: uncompressed WAV (PCM) for analog originals.

  • For video container formats, consider using MKV or MOV. MXF only if necessary (e.g. broadcast)

  • Capture analog video uncompressed (v210) or lossless (FFV1, J2K).

  • Or: At the highest quality (data rate) you can store and manage well over time.

Comments?

Questions?