Hello everyone. I have been considering video editing for quite some time and have finally decided to buckle down and learn the ropes. I have been doing research for a few days and have collected a lot of great information about digital media formats, but I'm having trouble putting everything together. I would really appreciate some guidance (in simple, basic, non-abbreviated terms!) I'm getting the idea that there are three parts to digital media: 1. A "container". 2. The streaming format itself/file type (biggest hurdle here). 3. Codecs to view material. From my own notes: I am having trouble understanding the concept of file types/streaming in relationship to their containers. For example, I *think* that MPEG-1, -2, and -4 are all file types which can be stored in their corresponding (or non-corresponding) containers. Codecs I think I understand fairly well... ...but again, sometimes I see DivX called a codec and sometimes called a file type, which is sort of messing me up. (I suspect sometimes it is erroneously called the latter). I'm looking forward to learning so thank you for tolerating these very basic questions. We all begin somewhere. ~LJemima
OK.. maybe I can help you out here.. You mention DivX. and Xvid.. they are both different compression methods which can be distributed in the .avi container. If you open the file in a hex editor (or similar.. something like gspot) it will read the file header which tells the player software what codec is needed to undo the particular compression used in encoding the file. I think the ffmpeg documentation will be the most helpful..(ffmpeg is a compression expansion encoding/decoding tool which can use pretty much every known video format) google around and you will find all the answers you seek
