manual/_manual/23_video-timeline/02_transcoding_formats_codecs.html

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layout: default
title: Transcoding, Formats & Codecs
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<h2>Video Formats and Codecs</h2>
<p>
A short primer on video-files, formats and codecs – because it is often cause for confusion:
</p>

<p>
A video file is a <em>container</em>. It usually contains one video-track and one or more audio-tracks.
</p>

<p>
How these tracks are stored in the file is defined by the <em>file-format</em>. Common formats are avi, mov, ogg, mkv, mpeg, mpeg-ts, mp4, flv, vob
</p>

<p>
Each of the tracks by itself in <em>encoded</em> - using a <abbr title="Coder-Decoder">Codec</abbr>. Common Video-Codecs are h264, mpeg2, mpeg4, theora, mjpeg, wmv3. Audio-Codecs: mp2, mp3, dts, aac, wav/pcm.
</p>

<p>
Not all codecs can be packed into a given format. For example the &#039;mpeg&#039; format is limited to mpeg2, mpeg4 and mp3 codecs (not entirely true). DVDs do have stringent limitations as well. The opposite would be .avi; pretty much every audio/video codec combination can be contained in an avi file-format.
</p>

<p>
To make things worse, naming conventions for video codecs and formats are often identical (esp mpeg ones) which leads to confusion.
All in all it is a very wide and deep field. Suffice there are different uses for different codecs and formats.
</p>

<h2>Ardour specific</h2>

<p>
Ardour supports a wide variety of video file-formats and video-codecs. More specifically, Ardour itself actually does not support any video at all but delegates handling of video files to <a href="http://ffmpeg.org">ffmpeg</a> which supports over 350 different video-codecs and more than 250 file-formats.
</p>

<p>
When importing a video into Ardour, it will be <em>transcoded</em> (transcoding: change from one format and codec to another) to avi/mjpeg for internal use (this allows reliable seeking to frames at low CPU cost - the file-size will increase, but hard-disks are large and fast).
</p>

<p>
The export dialog includes presets for common format &amp; codec combinations (such as DVD, web-video,..). If in doubt use one of the presets.
</p>

<p>
As last note: Every time a video is transcoded the quality can only get worse. Hence for the final mastering/<abbr title="Multiplexing Audio and Video">muxing</abbr> process, one should always to back and use the original source of the video.
</p>