Which audio/video formats are best and why?

Please help ...

After searching the 'net for information about
which audio and video formats are best, and why,
I am more confused than ever.

On my system, I came across some old audio files with
the file-name suffix .mid but I could not get those
files to play with vlc, smplayer, amarok, or audacity.

So, I went to several online file conversion sites
trying to find one that would work best to do some
file conversions, and that confused the subject further.

So, I'm hoping that the PLUG brain trust can provide
better information about this.

The only file conversion site that I found that could
deal with the .mid files was: www.zamzar.com

When I converted one of my files, music.mid to mp3,
the file played fine, but it increased the file size
from 6329 to 3163566, which seemed weird? Why so?

------6329 Apr 12 2003 music.mid
---3163566 May 11 19:41 music.mp3
---3362836 May 12 00:28 music.ogg
--37962478 May 12 00:29 music.wav

I also gried to convert the same file to .ogg and to .wav
with the size results seen above. This makes no sense.

Why would such a small source file be blown up to such
huge sizes and all sound the same?

Similar question about video files:
46235648 Jul 18 2018 workshop2.VOB
16811516 Jul 18 2018 workshop2.mkv
51575152 May 12 00:14 workshop2.mp4

Which of these three is a preferable format?
The all seem to look identical (to me) when played.
Why would the conversion from the original VOB to
mkv become so much smaller a file size and why
would the conversion from VOB to mp4 increase the size?

Hope so someone can help me make sense of this.




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