Maina Joseph
SCM211-0371/2016
ICS 2303
Multimedia Systems
15/11/2020
Common File Formats Used in multimedia
The following is an outline of current file formats used for the production and delivery of multimedia data.
Text Formats
RTF
Rich Text Format is the primary file format introduced in 1987 by Microsoft with the specification of their published products and cross-platform documents interchange.
Plain text
Plain text files can be opened, read, and edited with most text editors. Commonly used are Notepad (Windows), Gedit or nano (Unix, Linux), TextEdit (Mac OS, and so on. Other computer programs are also capable of reading and importing plain text. Plain text is the authentic and popular way of conveying an e-mail.
Image Formats
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)
This format is standard in the desktop publishing world (high-quality output) and is supported by almost all software packages. Recent versions of TIFF allow image compression, and the format is comfortable for moving large files between computers.
BMP (Bitmap)
Initially, this format is in use with Windows 3.1. It is quite large and uncompressed, and hence BMP is used for high-resolution or large images.
DIB (Independent Device Bitmap)
This format, which is similar to BMP, allows the files to be displayed on various devices.
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
GIF is a compressed image format. Most of the computer color images and backgrounds are GIF files. This file format is best suitable for graphics that uses only limited colors, and it is the most popular format used for online color photos. A 13-bit Color lookup table is used by the GIF format to identify its color values. This format is supported widely.
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
JPEG was designed to attain maximum image compression. It uses a lossy compression technique, where a compression method is referred that loses some of the data required for the image reconstruction. It works well with photographs, naturalistic artwork, and similar material but functions less on lettering, live drawings, or simple cartoons.
TGA (Targa)
It is the first popular format for high-resolution images. TGA is supported by Most of the video-capture boards.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
An extensible file format for the less loss, portable, and well-compressed storage of raster images. PNG acts as a replacement for GIF and also replaces multiple common uses of TIFF. PNG works well with online viewing applications like the worldwide web. So, it is fully streamable with the best display option.
Digital Audio File Formats
WAV (Waveform Audio File Format)
It is the most popular audio file format in windows for storing uncompressed sound files. It can also be converted to other file formats like MP3 to attain the reduced file size,
MP3 (MPEG Layer-3 Format)
MPEG Layer-3 format is the most popular format for storing and downloading music. The MP3 files are roughly compressed to one-tenth of the size of an equivalent WAV file.
OGG
A free, open-source container format is designed to obtain better streaming and evolves at high-end quality digital multimedia. It can be compared to MP3 files in terms of quality.
AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format)
A standard audio file format used by Apple is like a WAV file for the Mac.
WMA (Windows Media Audio)
It is a popular windows media audio format owned by Microsoft and designed with Digital Right Management (DRM) abilities for copyright protection.
RA (Real Audio Format)
Real Audio format is designed for streaming audio over the Internet. The digital audio resources are usually stored as a computer file on the computer’s hard drive or CD/DVD. Besides the variety of audio file formats available, the most common formats are wave files (.WAV) and MPEG Layer-3 files (.MP3), WMA and RA.
Digital Video File Formats
AVI (Audio/Video Interleave)
AVI is the video file format for Windows. Here sound and picture elements are stored in alternate interleaved chunks in the file.
MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group)
MPEG is a standard for generating digital video and audio compression under the International Standards Organization (ISO) by a group of people. The group has developed MPEG-1, the standard on which Video CD and MP3 are based; MPEG-2, the standard that supports products as Digital Television set-top boxes and DVD; MPEG-4, the standard for multimedia and mobile web.MPEG-7, the standard for the search of audio and visual content. Research on MPEG-21 “Multimedia Framework” has started in 2000. Simply MPEG is the standards for digital video and audio compression