.FLV and .MP4 Video Formats

There are several different formats that could be used for web, including two very popular ones that I’ll discuss in this paper, .flv and .mp4. “Web developers have wanted to use video and audio on the Web for a long time, ever since the early 2000s, when we started to have bandwidth fast enough to support any kind of video (video files are much larger than text or even images.) In the early days, native web technologies such as HTML didn’t have the ability to embed video and audio on the Web, so proprietary (or plugin-based) technologies like Flash (and later, Silverlight) became popular for handling such content. This kind of technology worked ok, but it had a number of problems, including not working well with HTML/CSS features, security issues, and accessibility issues.” as stated on the infamous authoritative mozilla web docs located at ‘developer.mozilla.org’.

Adobe crash, joke, Adobe Flash, or .FLV files had long been a popular choice, as well as Flash in general. This is a horrible option nowadays because it is essentially a third-party plugin, that some could even consider it called ‘Software’ these days. It is very slow, consumes a lot of resources and has a horrible cross browser, and especially cross device support these days. .Flvs had been pushed back to a fall back option for web users who are on older browsers that can’t render newer HTML5 techniques, but I think it is so clunky and outdated it shouldn’t even be used there.

.MP4 has been extremely popular and essentially the standard since ~2012 when the new HTML5 video and media tags so gracefully integrated and supported it; clearly .mp4 is a sleeker and lighter option to be used over the dreadful .flv files. “MP4 file format is suitable for video streaming over the internet , There is less loss of quality with higher degree of compression, It can store the data types other than video & audio , such as the object descriptors, the scene descriptors , other object oriented file structures & MPEG features. MP4 format has been preferred as a file format by most of the consumers , because of the versatility & the benefits it offers to the users , It can handle the most advanced technologies such as h.264, The separate hint track is used to encode streaming information , MP4 files can be run on all the main media players & sound card drivers.” touts Heba Soffar on their confident article on the topic published on May 12, 2017, on the estranged website ‘www.online-sciences.com’.

References:

Heba Soffar. (2017, May 13). MP4 file format uses , features , advantages and disadvantages. Retrieved from https://www.online-sciences.com/technology/mp4-file-format-uses-features-advantages-and-disadvantages/

Video and audio content. (n.d.). Retrieved from Mozilla Docs, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Multimedia_and_embedding/Video_and_audio_content