Video Stream Formats

There are some the main formats of streaming video in the Internet. Here they are: Real Media, Windows Media and Quicktime. MPEG used to be very popular till recently but now it is out of the market.

Mpeg

MPEG format was developed by Moving Picture Experts company and till recently considered to be a standard of stream broadcasting. There are some version of MPEG. MPEG-1 was created in 1988 and supported VHS quality while copying a video to CD-ROM. MPEG-1 had a great video quality for stream broadcasting. But it was required a high bitrate (1.5 Mb/sec) to watch the MPEG-1 movie. And its files were to heavy for the Internet.

MPEG-2 was developed to broadcast a digital TV and it was used to write video files to the DVD. And
4-9Mb/sec bitrate is required to brodcast a video. MPEG-4 was developed especially for internet and mobile stream broadcasting. Bitrate makes up 385 and 768 Kb/sec.

RealVideo

RealVideo - a format for stream brodcasting. It is not used to transfer video data on DVD and CD. The main feature of the RealVideo is that you can not compress and edit files repeatedly. But the high level of compression allows people to watch movies having a slow internet connection.

QuickTime

Quicktime format was developed by Apple and is used widely on Mac and Windows computers. It has many analogouses with RealTime format. Quicktime allows you to watch full screen video without quality loss. It is much better for consistent video streaming.

Windows Media

Windows Media is rather young format supported by Microsoft. It is very powerfull video sreaming format. The last development is Windows Media Video 9.