Video Formats

Watching a movie online using the streaming technology is not possible for everybody, especially if your internet connection is not good enough or if you simply don’t have any internet connection! But thankfully, there are plenty of other ways to watch movies and plenty of video players to use.

The first thing to take into consideration is the format of the video. The reason for that is because some media players can’t read all the formats available. This means it is better to always have at least two media players on your computer in case one media player can’t read a format. It can happen that the movie you want to watch is on a particular format like MP4 for example and not AVI. The problem is that not all media players can read MP4 for the moment.

 If you want to, you can buy very advanced media players if you want but you can usually find great players for free on the internet like VLC or the basic Windows Media Player!

Going back to the formats, AVI is a very common format for movies and a format you will certainly see a lot. To go into more details, it is short for audio video interleave and was first introduced by Microsoft at the beginning of the nineties. The AVI format has the advantage of being able to support audio and video at the same time therefore improving the quality and avoiding time difference between the image and the sound, which can be very very annoying.

More modern formats have also appeared recently like MP4, and offer much more interesting potential. This MP4 format is usually used more to store digital videos and digital audio files used on streaming films for example. It is also widely used on portable music devices like the Sony walkman digital player.