Today video is transmitted through the Internet in a variety of different formats. Some video formats you may encounter include Apple QuickTime, AVI, MPEG, RealVideo, Windows ASF and Windows Media Video. Recently a new trend of encapsulating video in Macromedia Flash files.

BlogTelevision.net automatically identifies and catalogs (currently) five types of video and one streaming metafile.

Apple Quicktime. Quicktime is popular cross platform vieo format. You can download a free Apple Quicktime player from Apple.

ASF: ASF or Advanced Streaming Format is specially designed to run over the Internet. ASF files can be highly compressed and can be delivered as a continuous flow of data (on-line TV or radio). Files can be of any size, and can be compressed to match many different bandwidths (connection speeds).

ASX: ASX (Advanced Stream Redirector) files are not media files, but metafiles. ASX files are plain text files used to describe multimedia content.

AVI: The AVI (Audio Video Interleave) format was developed by Microsoft. AVI is a common format for Windows based PC because it comes bundled with the operating system as part of the "Video for Windows (VfW)" distribution. The format is interleaved such that video and audio data are stored consecutively in an AVI file (i.e. a segment of video data is immediately followed by a segment of audio data.)

MPEG: MPEG stands for Moving Picture Experts Group and refers to the family of standards used for coding audio-visual information (e.g., movies, video, music) in a digital compressed format. A major advantage of MPEG compared to other video and audio coding formats is its sophisticated compression techniques.