Video formats refer to the way in which the video’s information is stored on digital devices or servers.
There are two main components to each video format; the Codec and the Container.
What is a codec?
Codec is actually an acronym, it stands for compressor and decompressor.
Think about all of the information contained in a video file – there are combinations of data related to images, audio, video, and meta data among others.
The amount of data held in a video file takes up a lot of space and the codec helps to reduce the amount of storage required to house each file. While in storage, the video codec will reduce the file size by merging like data, minimizing the number of colors in a video and reducing the resolution.
When the video is open for viewing or editing the same codec will decompress the data.
It is important to explain that Codecs can be “lossy” or “lossless” in their compression methods.
If the codec’s method of compression involves removing or merging files, this is what would be described as lossy. It can result in the quality of your file diminishing after each edit.
Lossless Codecs will store your data in a way that preserves all of the information from the original file, which is great, but there is a tradeoff for that benefit – a larger file size.
Basically, the two types of codec as it is named indicates that lossy codec gives loss in output which results low bandwidth consumption in network.
while lossless codec gives less loss in output which results high bandwidth consumption in network.
Example of codes are AVI, AVC, HEVC, MPEG 4, MP3, PKZIP and JPEG etc.
Codec are tools used to encode the video and audio to save the bandwidth consumption and to maintain the good quality output.