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What Is a Container Format

One of the most confusing things in digital media playback on a PC is the use of Container
Formats. This is to be expected as the average person should not need to know what a
container is or why container formats are used. But, in today’s world that is not true, so
.here is some very basic information about Container Formats

To start off, think of a Container Format as a standard shipping box. You get a box in the
mail and you think, “Cool! What’s inside.” The fact that you got a box means little to
nothing in the minds of most normal people. You don’t really care about the box itself, you
care about what’s in that box. The problem? You can’t see into the box. So, what do you
!do? You get a knife and cut it open, right? Then you get the goods inside

Container Formats follow this same basic idea. A few common containers are AVI, ASF,
WAV, MP4, Ogg, and Matroska. For the rest of this post I will use AVI, as this is the main
.problem out there for most people

So, now you have your AVI (i.e. a Box). You want to play this file, but before you can do that
you have to “open the box”. You might think this is talking about going to File | Open in
your favorite media player, but no! Way off. You need to get your knife and open it. Please
don’t take a knife to your PC, in this example the “knife” will be called DirectShow for short.
The magic of DirectShow “cuts open” your AVI and allows you to get the goods out. In the
.case of an AVI you have Audio and Video in there most of the time
 From there, DirectShow takes over again when and if you have the correct decoders
installed to decode the Audio and Video that was/is “Inside” your AVI (Or box) At this point
your box is open and you are enjoying what is inside! This can turn out to be another
problem, however. The audio and video inside a container can be encoded with any codec.
Windows Media Player supports playback of AVI files, but if the video is encoded with a third
party codec (i.e. DivX) you must first install the DivX Codec from DivXNetworks (Or a
compatible decoder) for Windows Media Player to truely “play“ the file. Without the correct
decoders Windows Media Player will just error out, and the video and/or audio might not be
.ouput

This is a very simple explanation of what a container is, I could go in much more, but the
.average person does not need to know anymore then that

Published Thu, Nov 4 2004 22:47 by chrisl