File formats
Look up file extensions, MIME types, signatures, identifiers, common uses, and technical properties.
80 records
File Format Cloud
A–Z IndexTotal formats: 80
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A compact multimedia container standardized by 3GPP for mobile devices and networks, based on the ISO Base Media File Format family.
An archive format developed for 7-Zip that supports multiple compression methods, solid compression, and AES-256 encryption.
A lossy audio coding format from the MPEG family widely used for music, streaming, broadcasting, mobile media, and audio tracks inside MP4-family containers.
An audio container developed by Apple and based on the IFF structure, commonly used for uncompressed PCM audio and professional audio workflows.
A speech-oriented audio format standardized for mobile communications, especially narrowband voice coding in cellular networks and voice recordings.
An extension of PNG for frame-based animation that keeps PNG's lossless compression and full alpha transparency while remaining compatible with static PNG decoders.
A simple Unix archive format best known for storing static libraries and for acting as a container inside package formats such as Debian DEB files.
A Microsoft RIFF-based multimedia container for interleaving video and audio streams, capable of carrying many different codecs.
A modern image format that stores AV1-encoded images inside a HEIF-based container and supports efficient compression, HDR, transparency, and image sequences.
A raster image format developed for Microsoft Windows that stores bitmap graphics with relatively simple image structures.
A binary serialization format designed to represent JSON-like documents with additional data types and efficient machine parsing, most closely associated with MongoDB.
A single-stream compressed file format produced by bzip2, using Burrows-Wheeler block sorting and Huffman coding for lossless compression.
A Microsoft archive format designed to package and compress groups of files, commonly used by Windows installers, drivers, and software distribution systems.
A Unix archive format and family of related layouts used to combine files and metadata into a sequential archive stream.
A plain-text data format that stores tabular records as rows and fields, commonly separated by commas.
The binary package format used by Debian and Debian-based Linux distributions, built as an ar archive containing package metadata and compressed filesystem data.
A standard file and communication format for medical imaging that can combine pixel data with patient, study, acquisition, and device metadata.
A document format designed for scanned pages and high-resolution documents, combining image layers, text, and compression techniques to reduce file size.
An open raw-image format created by Adobe for storing camera sensor data, metadata, previews, and processing instructions in a TIFF/EP-based structure.
The legacy binary document format used by Microsoft Word before DOCX, storing text, styles, tables, images, fields, and other document structures in an OLE compound file.
An Office Open XML package used for word-processing documents containing text, formatting, images, tables, and other document content.
A single-file publication format that packages structured web content such as HTML, CSS, SVG, fonts, metadata, and navigation for ebooks and digital publications.
An open audio format that reduces file size without discarding any information from the original digital audio signal.
A palette-based raster image format known for simple animations, lossless compression, and broad compatibility.
A compressed data format that applies gzip compression to a byte stream and is commonly paired with TAR archives on Unix-like systems.
A HEIF-based image format commonly used to store images encoded with HEVC, especially photographs captured on phones and cameras.
An ISO Base Media File Format based container designed to store individual images, image collections, sequences, metadata, and related image data.
The core markup format of the web, used to structure documents and applications with elements for text, links, media, forms, metadata, and interactive content.
A Microsoft Windows icon format that can store multiple icon sizes and color depths inside a single file.
A text-based calendar interchange format for events, tasks, journal entries, free-busy information, recurrence rules, alarms, and related scheduling data.
A JPEG 2000 image container that supports wavelet-based lossy and lossless compression and is widely used in imaging, archives, mapping, and cultural heritage workflows.
A raster image format widely used for photographs and other continuous-tone images, usually with lossy compression.
A modern image format standardized by the JPEG committee for high-quality lossy and lossless compression, HDR, alpha transparency, animation, and efficient recompression of JPEG images.
A text-based data interchange format for structured values including objects, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans, and null.
A 192-byte packet variant of MPEG-2 Transport Stream widely associated with Blu-ray Disc and AVCHD video, adding a timestamp prefix to standard transport-stream packets.
An audio-focused use of the MPEG-4 container, commonly carrying AAC or Apple Lossless audio and associated metadata.
A family of lightweight plain-text markup syntaxes that use readable punctuation conventions for headings, links, lists, emphasis, code, and other document structure.
A compact event-based music file format that stores notes, timing, controller events, tempo changes, and other performance instructions rather than recorded audio samples.
An extensible audiovisual container based on EBML that can carry multiple video, audio, subtitle, chapter, attachment, and metadata streams in one file.
A proprietary binary ebook format originally developed by Mobipocket and later used in early Amazon Kindle publishing and reading workflows.
A multimedia container developed by Apple for storing video, audio, timed media, metadata, and other media tracks.
A widely used compressed audio format based on MPEG Layer III audio coding, commonly paired with ID3 metadata.
A multimedia container based on the ISO Base Media File Format that can store video, audio, subtitles, images, and metadata.
A family of standardized moving-picture formats commonly associated with MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video streams and files using the .mpeg or .mpg extensions.
An OpenDocument presentation package for slides, text, graphics, layouts, animations, and related presentation content in an XML-based ZIP container.
An OpenDocument spreadsheet package for worksheets, formulas, tables, charts, styles, and related office data stored in an XML-based ZIP container.
An OpenDocument package for word-processing documents, using XML-based content and styles inside a ZIP-based container.
An open container format from Xiph.Org commonly used for audio streams such as Vorbis, Opus, Speex, and FLAC.
An Ogg container file used primarily for video, commonly combining Theora video with Vorbis or other Ogg-compatible audio and metadata streams.
A low-latency lossy audio format standardized by the IETF for speech, music, streaming, conferencing, and interactive applications, commonly stored in Ogg.
A simple Netpbm raster format for black-and-white images, available in both plain-text and compact binary encodings.
A document format designed to preserve page layout, text, graphics, fonts, and other content consistently across devices and software.
A simple Netpbm raster format for grayscale images, with plain-text and binary representations designed to be easy for programs to read and write.
A lossless raster image format widely used for screenshots, graphics, illustrations, and images that need transparency.
A Netpbm raster format for full-color RGB images, available in plain-text and binary forms and commonly used as a simple interchange format in image-processing tools.
The legacy binary presentation format used by Microsoft PowerPoint before PPTX, storing slides, text, shapes, images, media, and presentation records in an OLE compound file.
An Office Open XML presentation format used to store slides, text, images, charts, media, layouts, and presentation effects.
Adobe Photoshop's native layered raster document format for storing image data, layers, masks, channels, text, effects, and editing information.
A proprietary archive format designed for compressed file storage, multi-volume archives, recovery data, and encryption.
A document interchange format developed by Microsoft that represents formatted text, document structure, and embedded content using a text-based control-word syntax.
A text file containing SQL statements such as schema definitions, queries, inserts, updates, and database dump commands.
A self-contained relational database file format used by SQLite to store tables, indexes, schema information, and application data in a single cross-platform file.
An XML-based graphics format for scalable two-dimensional vector graphics that can also include text, raster images, styling, and animation.
An archive format originally developed for Unix systems that combines multiple files into one stream without providing compression itself.
A flexible raster image format used for high-quality imaging, scanning, publishing, photography, and archival workflows.
A UTF-8 configuration format designed to map clearly to a hash table using readable key-value pairs, tables, arrays, and strongly defined scalar types.
A packetized MPEG transport format designed for carrying synchronized video, audio, and metadata over broadcast, streaming, and error-prone delivery systems.
A plain-text tabular data format in which fields are separated by tab characters and records are generally stored one per line.
A simple text file containing unformatted character data without a required document structure or presentation format.
A RIFF-based audio container commonly used for uncompressed PCM audio, although it can carry several other audio encodings.
An open multimedia container based on a subset of Matroska and designed primarily for video and audio delivered on the web.
A raster image format designed for efficient image delivery with lossy and lossless compression, transparency, and animation.
An XML-based formulation of HTML that follows XML syntax rules while representing web-document structures and markup.
The legacy binary spreadsheet format used by Microsoft Excel before XLSX, storing worksheets, formulas, formatting, charts, and other workbook data in an OLE compound file.
An Office Open XML spreadsheet format used to store worksheets, formulas, tables, charts, styles, and other spreadsheet data.
A text-based markup format for representing structured documents and data using nested elements and attributes.
A lossless compressed stream container commonly used with LZMA2 and other filters, designed for high compression ratios, integrity checks, and stream concatenation.
A human-readable data serialization format built around indentation, mappings, sequences, and scalar values, commonly used for configuration and structured data.
A widely used archive format for packaging one or more files, usually with compression and optionally with encryption.
A lossless compressed data format using the Zstandard algorithm, designed for fast decompression, scalable compression levels, and streaming use.
About this reference
Extensions and MIME types
An extension identifies a filename type, while a MIME type describes content exchanged between applications, browsers, servers, and APIs.
File signatures
Many binary formats contain recognizable byte sequences. Some container formats require additional structural information to identify them reliably.