A helpful guide for Digital and Internet Video Producers

A Multi-part series of articles
By Lorraine Grula - Internet Video Gal

Part 6 - Miscellaneous Digital Video Formats

The list of different digital file formats is long. So far our special series of articles has covered Flash, Google, MPEG, .avi and many others. Today’s article covers additional Windows and Apple video file formats

WMV (Windows Media Video)
A .wmv file indicates one compressed using Microsoft's proprietary lossy compression format for motion video. Windows Media Video is used for both streaming and downloading content via the Internet. Microsoft's Windows Media Player, an application bundled with Windows Vista operating systems, lets you play back and manage a range of audio and video file types, including WMA and WMV.

.MOV: This is the file extension used to identify an Apple Quick Time Movie. Quicktime hasn’t been a Mac-only program for quite some time. Quicktime versions exist on almost all PCs. Some people argue that Quicktime is far superior to similar Windows based applications.

Xvid
Xvid is an open-source lossy video codec based on MPEG-4. It was developed in response to DivX, and received its name from the backwards spelling of DivX. Xvid compresses a great deal of video content into relatively small files, and retains a reasonably good video resolution. It can be used with several different operating systems, and is a popular choice for transferring video over the Internet.

If you see a video file on your computer labeled MSWMM, be aware that this is a windows movie maker project file and not a video or movie file designed for sharing. MSWMM will only play within Movie Maker. When you want to save your movie to share it, that is the time to use Movie maker to convert it into a more universal format, such as .avi or .wmv. This confuses many people. No matter what video editing software you use, a project file is designed for working on within the editing program. You must convert the project file to watch it on any other player.

This is the end of part 6 in our multipart series on video file formats.

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