AVI:

AVI stands for Audio Video Interleave, which is a container format. Namely it can contain multiple video streaming and audio streaming and encapsulate them to form AVI format.  

Compared with other video formats, its weak point is the heavy weight. It will take up more space than that of other formats. However, the advantage is very outstanding. It can keep the high video quality.

If you want to edit the video in the professional editing software such as Windows Movie Maker, Sony Vegas and Adobe Premiere, AVI is the greatest choice. It almost keeps the original high video quality and won’t lose much.

FLV:

Flash Live Video (FLV) is popular with web designer and Flash fans for the advantages itself that other formats don’t own. It offers high rates of compression and produces high quality video for playback on the websites. In relative terms, FLV is smaller in size than other formats in the same situation. Moreover, you do not have the compatibility trouble in all kinds of browsers. They can work in IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

3GP:

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3G/3GPP) is a collaboration agreement that was established in the 1990s. The 3GPP and 3GPP2 specifications call out specific types of media that exist in .3gp and .3g2 files.

Once you transfer a video file from mobile phone to your PC, the easiest way to play it is to use Apple’s QuickTime Player.

In general, if a mobile phone is to record a 3GP video, it should conform to the 3GP standard. However, a mobile phone may not have the ability to play all variety of 3G2 videos due to limited codec support on the phone. Thus, it is easy to convert a 3GP mobile video to a format playable on a computer, but it is not so easy to convert a PC video to a 3GP which is compatible with your particular brand of cell phone.

MOV:

QuickTime (*.mov) is a multimedia development, storage, and playback technology from Apple. QuickTime files combine sound, text, animation, and video in a single file. Using a QuickTime player that either comes with a Web browser or downloaded from Apple or the browser company, you can view and control brief multimedia sequences.

As a multimedia standard, QuickTime is not purely linear. It could contain interactivity and causes problems when converting to other video formats.  Now a lot of digital cameras record video in QuickTime support.

WMV:

WMV, as a video file format, stands for Windows Media Video. It was developed and controlled by Microsoft. WMV is a generic name of Microsoft’s video encoding solutions and doesn’t necessarily define the technology that it uses. Since WMV7, Microsoft has used its own flavor of MPEG-4 video encoding technology. DivX video format is originally based on the WMV codec.

MP3:

MP3 (MPEG Layer-3) is a digital audio compression algorithm that achieves a compression factor of about twelve while preserving the original sound quality. It does this by optimizing the compression according to the range of sound that people can actually hear. MP3 is currently the most powerful algorithm in a series of audio encoding standards developed under the sponsorship of the MPEG organization and formalized by the ISO.

MP4:

A video compression standard planned for late 1998. MPEG-4 extends the earlier MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 algorithms with synthesis of speech and video, fractal compression, computer visualization and artificial intelligence-based image processing techniques. MPEG.ORG is an excellent source for additional information on MPEG format and usage.

DVD video format:

DVD stands for Digital Versatile Disc. It is very often used as a replacement acronym for DVD-Video, which is one standard based on DVD format. Generally, DVD incorporates the divisions of DVD-Video and DVD-Audio.

DVD-Video is a standard developed by the DVD Forum, an authority behind various DVD standards, and specifies how video should be stored on optical DVD disc. DVD-Video specifications allow for two different kinds of video encoding algorithms: MPEG-2 and MPEG-1. Almost all DVD-Video discs use MPEG-2 format, mostly because of its superiority over MPEG-1 in terms of video quality.

DVD-Audio is music disc, aimed to replace regular audio CD within next few years.