A media container format (or sometimes referred to as a wrapper format) is a format that can contain various types of data such as audio and video data. The data is compressed using a codec. A codec (coder and decoder compound) is the algorithm used to compress and / or decompress stream multimedia data to reduce the number of bytes needed to store or send.
With a growing number of media containers, no wonder audio video converters are popular these days. Some converters can convert almost all different types of audio or video formats while others are limited to popular formats today. You can convert your best free online audio to video converter.
Some containers are limited to audio formats such as WAV files for Windows, AIFF for Mac and XMF; some are restricted to still images as FITS and TIFF. There is also a flexible container; that can withstand several types of audio, video and other media such as ASF files for Windows, MP4 and Matroska. The most common multimedia containers are:
3GP – used by mobile phones
ASF – standard WMA and WMV containers
AVI – Windows standard containers
Matroska – an open standard container
MPEG – standard container for MPEG-1 and MPEG-2
MP4 – standard container for MPEG-4
Ogg – free and open standard container for codec Vorbis (audio) and Theora (video)