Digital video and movie file extensions

Video and multimedia files represent a huge group of file types that contain digitally capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion, often together with an audio track (sound, music, etc.), which in essence means that a "video file" is but a container for all the multimedia data used during the playback.

You can find hundreds of different video formats, but only some of them made a popular breakthrough and became standards in the industry (computers, multimedia equipment, cinemas, home theaters, portable players etc.).

Some of the most used video file formats today are:

AVI format still represent one of the most common video containers, although it is slowly surpassed by more modern formats. AVI is an abbreviation for Audio Video Interleave format and was originally developed by Microsoft based on Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF). Multimedia content can be compressed in a multitude of supported video or audio formats and some codecs may be even added to the container, but a few special exceptions. These include (DivX, XVID, MP3, AAC) codecs that must be installed in the operating system or supported by the used multimedia device (DVD player, portable player etc.).

MPG (MPEG), a video format developed by Moving Picture Experts Group. MPEG is an ISO standard used by many multimedia devices (DVD players, Blu-RAY, portable players, computers).

VOB, a DVD Video object file. A .vob file is a container file that contains most of the movie data, including the video and audio streams, along with subtitles and any other DVD menu features. DVD uses the MPEG-2 compression.

MP4, a MPEG-4 multimedia file format based on ISO standard as defined by the MPEG-4 specification. It contains MPEG-4 encoded video and advanced audio coding (AAC)-encoded audio content. It also frequently uses h.264 or lately h.265 encoded videos. Nowadays it is perhaps one of the most commonly used multimedia format.

M2TS, a Blu-Ray MPEG-2 stream. The M2TS container format is based on the standard MPEG-2. Blu-ray are using transport streams, instead of DVD's program streams, to store video, audio, and other data. Used for high definition multimedia content.

MOV, QuickTime multimedia container format that can store one or more tracks of data such as video, audio, text, and effects. Used and known for ages by Mac users.

3GP, a standard for the creation, delivery and playback of multimedia over 3rd generation, high-speed wireless networks. You can mostly encounter 3GP multimedia files on mobile platforms.

MKV, a Matroska multimedia container based on an open standard format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks inside a single file.