Open format in the context of Document file format

A file format is the way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It may describe the encoding at various levels of abstraction including low-level bit and byte layout as well high-level organization such as markup and tabular structure. A file format may be standarized (which can be proprietary or open) or it can be an ad hoc convention.

Some file formats are designed for very particular types of data: PNG files, for example, store bitmapped images using lossless data compression. Other file formats, however, are designed for storage of several different types of data: the Ogg format can act as a container for different types of multimedia including any combination of audio and video, with or without text (such as subtitles), and metadata. A text file can contain any stream of characters, including possible control characters, and is encoded in one of various character encoding schemes. Some file formats, such as HTML, scalable vector graphics, and the source code of computer software are text files with defined syntaxes that allow them to be used for specific purposes.

VP9 is an open and royalty-free video coding format developed by Google.

VP9 is the successor to VP8 and competes mainly with MPEG's High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265).At first, VP9 was mainly used on Google's video platform YouTube. The emergence of the Alliance for Open Media, and its support for the ongoing development of the successor AV1, of which Google is a part, led to growing interest in the format.

Ogg is a digital multimedia container format designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of digital multimedia. It is maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation and is free and open, unrestricted by software patents. Its name is derived from "ogging," jargon from the computer game Netrek, alluding to the high processing cost of early versions of the software.

The Ogg container format can multiplex a number of independent streams for audio, video, text (such as subtitles), and metadata. In the Ogg multimedia framework, Theora provides a lossy video layer. The audio layer is most commonly provided by the music-oriented Vorbis format or its successor Opus. Lossless audio compression formats include FLAC, and OggPCM.

FLAC (/flæk/; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software package that includes a codec implementation. Digital audio compressed by FLAC's algorithm can typically be reduced to between 50 and 70 percent of its original size and decompresses to an identical copy of the original audio data.

FLAC is an open format with royalty-free licensing and a reference implementation which is free software. FLAC supports metadata tagging, album cover art, and fast seeking.

AOMedia Video 1 (AV1) is an open, royalty-free video coding format initially designed for video transmissions over the Internet. It was developed as a successor to VP9 by the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia), a consortium founded in 2015 that includes semiconductor firms, video on demand providers, video content producers, software development companies and web browser vendors. The AV1 bitstream specification includes a reference video codec. In 2018, Facebook conducted testing that approximated real-world conditions, and the AV1 reference encoder achieved 34%, 46.2%, and 50.3% higher data compression than libvpx-vp9, x264 High profile, and x264 Main profile respectively.

Like VP9, but unlike H.264 (AVC) and H.265 (HEVC), AV1 has a royalty-free licensing model that does not hinder adoption in open-source projects.

VP8 is an open and royalty-free video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008.

Initially released as a proprietary successor to On2's previous VP7 format, VP8 was released as an open and royalty-free format in May 2010 after Google acquired On2 Technologies. Google provided an irrevocable patent promise on its patents for implementing the VP8 format, and released a specification of the format under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. That same year, Google also released libvpx, the reference implementation of VP8, under the revised BSD license.

Ogg is a digital multimedia container file format designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of digital multimedia. It is maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation and is free and open, unrestricted by software patents. Its name is derived from "ogging," jargon from the computer game Netrek, alluding to the high processing cost of early versions of the software.

The Ogg container format can multiplex a number of independent streams for audio, video, text (such as subtitles), and metadata. In the Ogg multimedia framework, Theora provides a lossy video layer. The audio layer is most commonly provided by the music-oriented Vorbis format or its successor Opus. Lossless audio compression formats include FLAC, and OggPCM.