Anatomy of a Video

 

 

When you look behind the scenes of a video on YouTube you will notice that each video has more than one video (in the example below, YouTube has 24 videos). Streaming video companies like YouTube, Netflix, Apple, Pluto and others need to support different devices with different bandwidths and screen resolutions.  If the internet gets too bogged down, video providers will step down to the next video at a lower bandwidth until a higher bandwidth is available.   

Most video files are actually containers.  mp4, avi, mov, mkv and flv are containers.  Containers can hold a lot of information, audio,audio tracks in different languages, video, closed caption text files etc. 

Codecs are different from containers as they compress and decompress different file.  The word codec was even taken from compress and decompress.  Most popular codecs are h.264, h.265 or hevc, aac, mp3 and others vp9 is a youtube codec.

Tools like ffprobe and mediainfo allow you to see inside of a video container.  Most containers contain a compressed video and at least 1 audio track.

StreamEngine allows you to convert up to 8 audio tracks inside of a container.

Below is a video from the united nations with many different language tracks.