In today’s issue, we’re going to look at some of the more common file types that appear on the Windows Operating System.
Bmp: Stands for Bitmap. One of the most basic types of image storage, Bitmaps tend to be larger than JPEGs, as they’re completely uncompressed. The pixels of a bitmap are resolution-dependent, so it’s very difficult to change the size of an image without degrading the quality.
Gif: Graphics Interchange Format. A type of compressed Bitmap, it allows for animation and transparency, but only allows resolutions of 256 colors.
Jpeg: Joint Photographic Experts Group. Another type of compressed bitmap, this format eliminates details from photographs and the like that are typically not visible to the human eye.
Midi:Midi stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and is among the earliest audio file formats seen on the PC. Rather than being an actual recording, it’s a set of instructions for the computer which causes it to output audio in a particular fashion. As a result, midi files are incredibly small, but also tend to suffer in terms of quality.
Wav: The Waveform Audio File format is of much higher quality than midi files, but limited to a maximum size of 4 Gigabytes.
Mp3: Mp3 stands for MPEG 1 or 2 Layer III. It’s pretty much the industry standard for audio compression and playback on electronic devices. It’s also a form of audio compression, which removes sounds that are typically determined to be outside the audible spectrum, developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group.
MPEG 4: Essentially, a video compression technique similar to the audio technique for MP3s. MPEG4 is one of the standard video file formats for the PC, and provides a number of convenient features for developers, service providers, and users.
AVI: Stands for Audio/Video Interleave, the AVI format was developed by Microsoft back in 1992. Due to the many limitations of this file format, it’s not really as widely-used as it used to be.
WMV: Windows Media Video. Another video format developed by Microsoft (this one in 2003), the WMV compression format is actually a competitor of several other video formats, including the MPEG 4 association.
Exe: Executable. Basically, it’s a program. Careful when opening up an EXE if you don’t know where it came from- they occasionally tend to contain viruses.
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