66 formats, in plain English

Photos, screenshots, icons, textures and scans.

• PNG Portable Network Graphics A lossless image format with full transparency
• JPG JPEG A lossy photo format that trades detail you can’t see for much smaller files
• JFIF JPEG File Interchange Format An ordinary JPEG photo that carries the .jfif extension
• WEBP WebP A web image format that can be lossy or lossless, with transparency and animation
• AVIF AV1 Image File Format A modern image format that squeezes photos smaller than WebP
• GIF Graphics Interchange Format A 256-color image format best known for short looping animations
• BMP Windows Bitmap An uncompressed grid of pixels
• TIFF Tagged Image File Format A high-fidelity format used by scanners, printers and archives
• ICO Windows Icon A small container that holds the same icon at several sizes
• HEIC High Efficiency Image Container The iPhone’s photo format, built on the HEVC video codec
• SVG Scalable Vector Graphics A vector format made of shapes instead of pixels
• TGA Truevision TGA (TARGA) A simple raster format with an alpha channel, common in games and 3D work
• PPM Portable Pixmap A bare-bones color image format with no compression
• PGM Portable Graymap An uncompressed grayscale image format
• PBM Portable Bitmap A pure black-and-white image format, one bit per pixel
• APNG Animated PNG A PNG that animates, with full color and soft transparency
• DDS DirectDraw Surface A GPU texture format with block compression and mipmaps
• PSD Photoshop Document Photoshop’s layered working file
• EXR OpenEXR A high dynamic range format that stores light as floating-point numbers
• XWD X Window Dump A raw screen capture from Unix and Linux desktops
• JPEG 2000 JPEG 2000 A wavelet-based image format used by cinema, medicine and archives

From phone recordings to DVDs, camcorders and old web video.

• MP4 MPEG-4 Part 14 The video container that plays on everything, usually holding H.264 video and AAC audio
• WEBM WebM The web’s open video format, holding VP8, VP9 or AV1 video with Opus or Vorbis audio
• MKV Matroska Video A flexible container for any codec, with several audio and subtitle tracks
• MOV QuickTime Movie Apple’s video container, usually H.264 or HEVC from an iPhone
• AVI Audio Video Interleave Windows’ original video container, common for older camcorder files and downloads
• FLV Flash Video The video format of the Flash-era web
• OGV Ogg Video Open-source Theora video in an Ogg container
• 3GP 3GPP Multimedia A small mobile video format from the feature-phone era
• MPG MPEG-1 / MPEG-2 Program Stream The video format of Video CDs, DVDs and early camcorders
• TS MPEG Transport Stream The broadcast container, also used by camcorders (.mts) and web streaming
• WMV Windows Media Video The Windows Media video format from the Windows XP era
• VOB DVD Video Object The MPEG-2 video files inside a DVD’s VIDEO_TS folder
• ASF Advanced Systems Format Microsoft’s streaming container, found on old CCTV recorders and Windows Media streams
• RM RealMedia RealNetworks’ streaming video format from the dial-up era
• DIVX DivX Video An AVI-style file with DivX (MPEG-4 Part 2) video
• F4V Flash MP4 Video An MP4-style file from late-era Flash video
• MXF Material Exchange Format The professional broadcast and camera container
• OGM Ogg Media An unofficial Ogg variant from early-2000s fan releases
• DV Digital Video Raw footage captured from MiniDV tapes and camcorders
• M2V MPEG-2 Video Stream A raw MPEG-2 video stream with no audio
• SVI Samsung Video Video from Samsung’s old portable media players
• NUT NUT Open Container A lean container format from the FFmpeg developers
• Y4M YUV4MPEG2 Raw, uncompressed video frames used for codec testing
• M4V Apple MPEG-4 Video An MP4 video with Apple’s extension

Music, voice notes, podcasts, surround soundtracks and lossless rips.

• MP3 MPEG-1 Audio Layer III The most compatible lossy audio format ever made
• WAV Waveform Audio File Uncompressed, studio-quality audio
• M4A MPEG-4 Audio AAC audio in an MP4 container, Apple’s everyday audio format
• OGG Ogg Vorbis Open-source lossy audio, common in games and on Android
• OPUS Opus The most efficient audio codec in common use, especially for speech
• FLAC Free Lossless Audio Codec Lossless audio at roughly half the size of WAV
• AIFF Audio Interchange File Format Uncompressed audio, Apple’s equivalent of WAV
• WMA Windows Media Audio The Windows Media audio format from the Windows XP era
• AC3 Dolby Digital Dolby Digital surround sound from DVDs and TV
• AAC Advanced Audio Coding (raw stream) A bare AAC audio stream without the M4A wrapper
• AMR Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrow-band speech audio from phones and call recorders
• APE Monkey’s Audio Lossless audio squeezed slightly smaller than FLAC
• MPC Musepack A lossy codec tuned for transparency, from the early 2000s audiophile scene
• RA RealAudio Streaming audio from the dial-up web
• TTA True Audio A fast, simple lossless audio codec
• WV WavPack A flexible lossless (or hybrid) audio codec
• AU Sun Audio A simple audio format from Sun and NeXT workstations
• CAF Core Audio Format Apple’s professional audio container
• GSM GSM 06.10 Audio Phone-quality speech from telephone systems and voicemail
• DTS DTS Digital Surround Cinema surround sound from DVDs and Blu-rays
• MKA Matroska Audio Audio tracks in a Matroska container