List+of+Video+Container+Formats


 * ** MPEG 4, usually with an .mp4 extension. The MPEG 4 container is based on Apples older Quicktime container (.mov). Movie trailers on Apple's website still use the older QuickTime container, but movies that you rent from iTunes are delivered in an MPEG 4 container, although Apple likes to use the .m4v file extension instead of .mp4. **


 * ** Advanced Systems Format, usually with an .asf or .wmv extension. ASF was invented by and is primarily used by Microsoft in their Windows Media Player and their handheld Zune media device. **


 * ** Flash Video, usually with an .flv extension. Flash Video is, unsurprisingly, used by Adobe Flash. Prior to Flash 9.0.60.184 (a.k.a. Flash Player 9 Update 3), this was the only container format that Flash supported. More recent versions of Flash also support the MPEG 4 container. **


 * ** Matroska, usually with an .mkv extension. Matroska is an open standard, unencumbered by any known patents, and there are open source reference implementations for doing everything you might want to do with MKV files. It is primarily used by Free Software-loving hippies and, oddly enough, pirates who rip high-definition movies and television shows and release them in The Scene. **


 * ** Ogg, usually with an .ogv extension. Like Matroska, Ogg is an open standard, open-source-friendly, and unencumbered by any known patents. Like Matroska, it is used primarily by Free Software-loving hippies, but that may begin to change once Mozilla ships their Firefox 3.1 browser. Firefox 3.1 will support — natively, without platform-specific plugins — the Ogg container format, the Ogg video codec (Theora), and the Ogg audio codec (Vorbis). On the desktop, Ogg is supported out-of-the-box by all major Linux distributions, and you can use it on Mac and Windows by installing the Quicktime components or Direct Show filters, respectively. **


 * ** Audio Video Interleve, usually with an .avi extension. Also known as “the crappy, obsolete format that just won’t die.” The AVI container format was invented by Microsoft in a simpler time when the fact that computers could play video at all was considered pretty amazing. It does not officially support many of the features of more recent container formats; it does not officially support any sort of video metadata; it does not even officially support most of the modern video and audio codecs in use today. Over time, various companies have tried to extend it in generally incompatible ways to support this or that, and it is still the default container format for popular encoders such as Mencoder. **


 * Source: A gentle introduction to video encoding by Mark Pilgrim **