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Formated files include the video stream, the audio stream, and the meta data. This works with the video stream telling the player what needs to appear on the screen while the audio stream tells the player which sounds needs to be played alongside the video. The meta data, which means “data about data”, includes all of the other information about the video, including things like the bit-rate type, resolution, subtitles, device and time of creation, and more.One of the most important pieces of meta data which you may have run into if you’ve worked with video files, is the codec.

Let’s start with the video codecs. A good place to begin is H.264, or AVC as it’s commonly referred to. H.264 is by far the most commonly used video codec, mostly because it provides a significantly better bitrate over it’s predecessors for the same file size. For this reason, it is very widely supported and you can be confident you will rarely run into any support issues using the H.264. It’s successor, H.265 is referred to as HEVC which stands for High Efficiency Video Coding.This codec delivers on it’s name, with a compression rate that is almost double that of H.264.

There are other codecs as well, but currently those are the most important for audio and video.Now that we know the basics, we can finally talk about video file formats. File Formats are standardized rules for storing the containers, codecs, meta data and sometimes even folder structure of video files, so that it’s easier to support them across a large number of different devices and players. Since the very first digital video formats became popular, new formats have been developed every year in an attempt to take their place - aiming for improvements in image quality, file size, video playback, and the addition of special features. A video format can become popular when a large platform decides to support content with that format in their product, usually because of a technological breakthrough or special use case.

This is because editing videos generally demands higher quality files while online distribution focuses on smaller file sizes and smoother playback. For the purposes of this video, we’re mainly covering online distribution to address the growing demand of on the internet. Also, stick around until the end of this video for special tips getting the best quality from your YouTube uploads, by using the right formats, codecs and settings. Let’s start by covering some of the most popular formats. That first format we’ll look at is MP4, more specifically MPEG-4, and even more specifically MPEG-4 Part 14.The name MPEG-4 can be very confusing because different people use it for dozens of completely different things.

The three most common things people mean when they say MPEG-4 are: The MP4 Container (MPEG-4 Part 14), which we are currently discussing The ISO Base Media File Format (MPEG-4 Part 12) used for video streams. The H.264 codec (MPEG-4 Part 10) is used to compress video files. For the purposes of this video, we are talking about the MP4 format, which is virtually synonymous with the container.

MP4 is a great container for exporting videos for the web, because of it exists in a single container and has wide support across devices and operating systems. Due to the unpredictability of a user's internet speed and growing demand of live streaming, a newer video technology, called adaptive bitrate segmentation, has been growing in popularity of the last few years. Adaptive bitrate, commonly referred to as ABR, works by converting a video stream into multiple resolutions with different bitrates. This clips can then be swapped between each other if there are changes to the wifi or mobile network, preventing interruption of playback while the user's internet catches up.