HTML 5 Audio and Video

Some of the popular video container formats include the following:

• Audio Video Interleave (.avi)
• Flash Video (.flv)
• MPEG 4 (.mp4)
• Matroska (.mkv)
• Ogg (.ogv)

Audio and Video Codecs

Audio and video coders/decoders (codecs) are algorithms used to encode and decode a particular audio or video stream so that they can be played back. Raw media files are enormous, so without encoding, a video or audio clip would consist of tremendous amounts of data that could be too large to transmit across the Internet in a reasonable amount of time. Without a decoder, the recipient would not be able to reconstitute the original media source from the encoded form. A codec is able to understand a specific container format and decodes the audio and video tracks that it contains. Some example audio codecs are the following:

• AAC
• MPEG-3
• Ogg Vorbis 

Example video codecs are the following:

• H.264
• VP8
• Ogg Theora