Most "universal" type of video file?

[LuKreme]

On 13-May-2008, at 19:27, R.L. Grigg wrote:
> What is the most "universal" type of video file? What could be  
> viewed on almost any system, Mac or Windows, without requiring  
> certain packages or codecs?

Nothing fits that bill.  Especially since Windows, out of the box,  
supports almost no video formats outside of WM9/10 and MPGE1, and  
these only if the machine has WMP installed (and really, an awful lot  
of PCs do not).

> .wmv .avi .mov .mpg .asf .mp4

Keep in mind that these are containers, not video formats.

".mpg" can contain all sorts of video formats.  A MPEG1 will be huge  
for the amount of video it contains, but it will play on a Pentium,  
and maybe a 486.

MPEG2 is useful if you want to ever put the video out to non-computers  
(DVDs).

I encode in h.264 MPEG4 because I care more about high quality and  
excellent compression than about a 10 year old computer being able to  
play it, and a h.264/x264 will play on just about any reasonable  
computer.

> I have some .3g2 files to convert and have all these choices but  
> don't know which one would be the best to give out to people. I  
> don't plan to use any special encoding I just want to make a simple  
> movie file anyone can play.

Pretty much anyone who is willing to play video will be able to handle  
an h.264/x264 file.  You will never get to *anyone* can play it  
because there are still people out there using Mac SEs, Atari 800s, or  
TRS-80s.  You have to define what 'anyone' means to you.

flv will play on more machines without effort than any other format,  
but lots of office PCs can't play flvs because they don't have Flash  
installed at all.  Of course, these machines will probably not have  
any video support...

Then of course there are all the divx/xvid variants. DivX is probably  
the most popular format for video right now.

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