• AVI - Audio-Video Interleave format

• MPEG - Moving Picture Experts Group format

• MOV - Quicktime Movie format

• MCF - Multimedia Container Format - open source

• AU - Sun Audio format

• AIFF - Audio Interchange File Format

• WAV - Waveform Audio

• OGG - Ogg Vorbis - open source

• ....

Codecs are ways to encode media. They generally fall into two categories:

Audio Codecs
• MPEG 1 Audio Layer 2

• MPEG 1 Audio Layer 2.5

• MPEG 1 Audio Layer 3

• PCM - Pulse Code Modulation

• ADPCM - Adaptive Pulse Code Modulation

• Vorbis - Ogg Vorbis - open source

• RealAudio

• ...

Video Codecs
• MPEG 1 Video

• MPEG 2 Video

• XviD - XviD open source MPEG4 implementation

• RealVideo

• ...

In summary, containers are basically packages that wrap up data that has been encoded by a codec.