Google(Initially developed by On2, Xiph and Matroska)
Overview
WEBM is a multimedia container used for both audio and video formats. It is open-source and royalty-free software due to this, it can be implemented and changed for improvement by any developer. It uses different codecs to compress files. For instance, for video streams compression it uses VP8 or VP9 video codecs and for audio streams, it uses Vorbis or Opus audio codecs. It provides videos of the highest quality and that too with real-time delivery. It provides users with the playback option on any device which is due to the low computational footprint. It is licensed under BSD(A family of acceptable free software licenses). Besides this, it has another project named as Webp for images.
Technical description
Its structure is based on the Matroska container. That is why it can support both multiplexing and de-multiplexing. It uses core technologies like HTML, HTTP and TCP/IP which can be easily implemented and this is the main reason for its success. VP8 and VP9 are highly efficient to provide video of the highest quality. It is cost-effective due to its greater efficiency for bandwidths. It is a substitute for H.264 and MPEG4 which are patented software and have copyright. Videos of this format allow playback but it is possible only in Android version 2.3 that is Gingerbread and above. When ‘Rockchip’ came into the market in 2001 it made possible the implementation of full hardware of 1080p. Also, LiVES video editor version 1.4.9 allows coding and deflating of videos in real-time.
This file format stores both audio and video files for playback purposes. It is used to store files that are of high quality as file compression is less in this extension. Windows OS uses this as the default format to store multimedia files but other operating systems such as Linux, Unix and Mac also support this. The data in it is encoded by various codecs such as DivX and XviD. There is a variety of software that support these files. For instance- Microsoft Movies & TV, Windows Media Player and Apple QuickTime player; etc. Due to its low compression ability, it is widely used to make short movies, promos and advertisements; etc. It should be noted that AVI format result in large files that is why it is rarely used for video streaming.
Technical description
In AVI extension, file's data is divided into blocks or chunks as it is a sub-format of RIFF(Resource Interchange file format). An identification of each chunk is done by FourCC tag. File header and metadata of video(like height, width and frame rate) are identified by ‘hdrl tag' which is sub-chunk and it is mandatory. There is one another chunk which is also obligatory that is ‘movi tag' and it has actual audio or video data. The last sub-chunk is ‘idx1 tag' and it records the offsets of the data chunks. This ‘idx1 tag' is completely optional. There is one limitation of this format that it does not contain variable bitrate data.
