Talk:Comparison of video container formats

'Owned by' column - comments on my changes regarding matroska container
The matroska specs are not owned by any entity. They belong into the public domaine, and are therefore owned by every person on this planet, in the very second when they are released publically. The matroska.org opensource team, consisting of (currently) three project administrators and an undefined number of project supporters, care about the specs and the software tools to create, edit and play matroska files. This, however, will NOT effect the various licenses for the code of these tools. It up to the individual programmer to decide on a license for his code, as long as he is not bound by the license of code he was building his tools on.

Christian HJ Wiesner matroska project admin Sao Paulo, Oct. 2005 --ChristianHJW~enwiki (talk) 18:14, 23 October 2005‎ (UTC)

mp4 vs. mov
mp4 (Also known as MPEG-4 Part 14 or ISOBMFF or MPEG-4 Part 12 or JPEG 2000 Part 12) and mov (QTFF) are the same format. The only difference is that for mp4 H.261, H.262, H.263, H.264, H.265 (the last one only in MPEG-4 Part 14) are the only allowed video codecs. Similar restrictions are in place for audio and subtitle formats. Together with MJ2 and 3GP they are often referenced as "MP4 Family".

But in this article it is stated, that all the codecs that are only valid for mov are possible in mp4. The source for that is the MP4RA: These codecs have codec codes there. Since this organization registers these codes for all these filetypes it is of course not a proof, that a codec can be used in all of these formats. It is even not a proof, that it can be used in one of these formats.

I would like to correct this and put QTFF and mp4 in neighboring columns. – Any comments? --Fabiwanne (talk) 14:36, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

Notability
I was thinking of reordering the columns in the tables to put the popular and flexible containers first and the more obscure and restrictive ones last.

From my experience:
 * Most popular formats for new video encodings at the moment: MP4, MKV, ASF (WMV), WebM
 * Historically popular formats: MP4, MKV, AVI, MPEG-derived (PS/TS, M2TS, VOB), QuickTime-derived (QTFF, 3GP/3G2), Adobe family (FLV, F4V), RMVB
 * AVI was very popular for a long time, but was replaced by ASF, although at a time when MP4 and MKV were already quite popular. So ASF hasn't become that popular, but I would put the two together.
 * MXF looks a little bit obscure but supports many current video, audio and subtitle formats.
 * The new WebM format doesn't seem to be growing in popularity.

So I think the following is a possibly sensible order of notability, with some internal grouping of related formats:
 * 1) Flexible and popular
 * 2) MKV
 * 3) MP4
 * 4) QTFF (related to MP4)
 * 5) ASF
 * 6) AVI (related to ASF)
 * 7) Flexible and not so popular: MXF
 * 8) Restrictive and popular
 * 9) MPEG-derived
 * 10) PS/TS
 * 11) M2TS
 * 12) VOB
 * 13) EVO
 * 14) 3GP/3G2 (QuickTime-derived)
 * 15) Adobe family
 * 16) F4V (QuickTime-derived)
 * 17) FLV
 * 18) Ogg
 * 19) WebM
 * 20) RMVB
 * 21) Restrictive and not so popular: DMF

I previewed this order using the visual editor and I think the result is more useful than the current ordering. What do you think? --Fernando Trebien (talk) 17:23, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

HVEC support in AVI
Under "Video coding formats support" it says AVI[b] supports HEVC. Note b says the following: "AVI officially supports all codecs in the Media Foundation". It looks like the Media Foundation doesn't support HEVC. Am I overlooking something or is this a mistake in the article? Joontje (talk) 06:58, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
 * H.265 and HEVC are listed as video subtype GUIDs in Media Foundation documents, and H.265 is listed in RFC-2361. I think this means that the Media Foundation doesn't include a HEVC decoder, but if it did then HEVC would in principle be supported in AVI (and ASF and others), although it's probably very rare as there are better containers. There are a few other combinations like this where one could argue from the specification that the combination is expected to be supported, but it is not used in practice and support in tools doesn't seem to exist. --Fernando Trebien (talk) 16:14, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

TTML
Shouldn't there be a row for TTML? 46.208.6.20 (talk) 01:57, 24 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I think only SMPTE-TT and EBU-TT are supported, and only by MXF. Do you know of any other supported combinations? --Fernando Trebien (talk) 23:35, 14 February 2024 (UTC)