MP4, AVI, MOV, FLV...etc...etc are container formats. Think of them
as specialty file systems that hold the various "files" that make up
of the video. Those parts can include the video, the audio,
subtitles, thumbnail images, meta data... etc...etc.. and often time
multiple versions of any combination of those.
The various containers can usually hold a number of different types
of video formats inside them such as h.264, h.264/HEVC, MPEG4,
Theora, VP8, VP9, AV1. Then there are different audio formats and
they can usually use just about anything you can think of as an
audio codec, such as MP2, WAV but often times they use formats that
you don't usually see outside of a video pairing like AC3, AAC, but
there's no reason you couldn't just have an stand alone audio file
in any format that can be encoded into a video.
So just looking at the suffix of the video file won't tell you
anything about if your computer can play it back or not. What you
really need to know is the CODECS that make up various parts of the
video are and the resolution that the video is stored at. Your
computer will have an easier time of with some video formats than
others. You'll find that your computer will usually have an easier
time with older video formats that are much larger because the
hardware decompressing support for that format is baked into the GPU
or the CPU, so you'll find that putting a newer generation video
card into even an old computer can make it instantly be able to play
back the most modern 4K video simply because all the decompressing
is happening on the GPU and the CPU has little to do with it.
If you have VLC, you can go to "Tools -> Codec Information" and
"Tools -> Media Information" and it will give you a rough
breakdown of what makes up your particular video.
Another really nice tool is mediainfo ( apt install mediainfo ).
Just run that with your video file name as the argument and it will
spit out info about all the various parts that make up your video
(or audio) file.
Brian Cluff
PS
My personal favorite container format is MKV since it seems to be
able to hold just about anything you throw at it without limitation.
On 4/7/22 08:46, Michael via
PLUG-discuss wrote:
about converting it to x264..... is this going to
be an mp4 file?