File Types

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MP3 and WAV

MP3 (Moving Picture Experts Group Layer-3 Audio)

  • MP3 uses lossy compression as it removes a lot of the sounds in songs which our ears are unable to hear. This results in MP3 files being around 11 times smaller than uncompressed music tracks.
  • MP3 is generally used for music and podcasts. Almost every portable digital music player supports the MP3 audio format.

WAV (Waveform Audio Format)

  • Like MP3, WAV is used in all areas of audio such as portable players and handheld recorders. It was developed by Microsoft IBM in 1991.
  • However unlike MP3, WAV is lossless as it uses analogue to digital converters to take samples thousands of times per second and converting the audio signal to binary. Also, most of the time, WAV uses PCM (Pulse-Code Modulation) which uses an uncompressed, lossless storage method.
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MP4 and BMP

MP4 (Moving Picture Experts Group Layer-4 Audio)

  • MP4 is the file extension for the MPEG-4 container format (more commonly known as MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Viedo Coding)) and contains both audio and video as well as other multimedia content such as graphics and animations.
  • MP4 is a lossless file type.

BMP (Bitmap)

  • BMP is a digital image file format used in digital photography as well as other applications such as Microsoft Paint.
  • The BMP format is both lossless and uncompressed. '.bmp' is the only uncompressed format available for images.
  • Each bitmap file contains a bitmap-file header, a bitmap-information header, a colour table and an array of bytes that defines the bitmap bits.
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MOV and AVI

MOV (QuickTime Movie)

  • MOV is a common multimedia container file developed by Apple. It is compatible with Macintosh and Windows platforms. It may contain multiple tracks that store different types of media data and is often used for saving movies and other video files.
  • MOV is lossy as it generally uses the MPEG-4 codec for compression, like MP4
  • MOV is similar to MP4 except for the fact that MP4 is recognised as an international standard and is generally more widely supported than MOV files.

AVI (Audio Video Interleaved)

  • AVI is a sound and motion picture file that conforms to the Microsoft Windows Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) specification. It requires a special player that may be included in a web browser or could require downloading
  • AVI is one of the hardest files to read. They have two different ways of compression. One is lossy and the other is lossless. These two types are very different in terms of the way they are compressed and the resulting sound/video produced afterwards is also
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JPEG

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)

  • JPEG is considered a lossy graphics format. JPEG compression tends to even out transitional colours (the points in an image where one colour becomes a different colour). This reslults in pixellization (where the image takes on a blocky appearance).
  • JPEG is best used for photographs and still images. However, JPEGs are not suitable for images which feature line drawings or images with simple shapes such as icons or buttons as these have sharp edges affected by the pixellization of the transitional colours. For these images, GIF or PNG is more suitable
  • Likewise, JPEG does not preserve transparency and if a transparent background is required, PNG would be a more appropriate option to use.
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PDF

PDF (Portable Document Format)

  • PDF is lossless as no information gets lost during the compression process. Lossless PDF compression works by reorganizing document data for more efficient storage, while maintaining all of the key information.
  • PDF was created by Adobe Systems in 1993. PDF files are able to preserve the formats, fonts, drawings and other file components of virtually any electronic document file and present it in a universal format.
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