Video History Lesson please

[HauntingShock]

Could someone link me to a page about video formats and containers' history? or just simply post in this thread.

I'd like to know:

when did .avi and .mkv became a standard.
when it was .avi 's time, was 720p and 1080p video available?
what was the video standard before .avi and what year was that.
how come most(or all) shows from 2006 are 4:3?

[Groucho2004]

I'm quite sure that you'll get all your answers on Wikipedia.

[Mug Funky]

analog 1035i has existed since the late '80s, but was pretty much never used.

avi and mov are about the same age. it's hard to tell. they're primarily consumer formats, and when digital video first came about, storage was not dense enough to be able to work with anything but single still pictures in sequence. it all worked from tape to tape, and digital film restoration took months rather than hours.

mkv was developed by the video-trading community to accomodate their unique needs (subtitles, new, more efficient encoding, b-frames) that only had ugly hacks for avi. mov was confined to mostly apple where DVD ripping didn't take off until years later with jack the ripper and handbrake.

there were other formats developed at the same time, but a mix of features and politics saw that mkv became the go-to format. personally i think ogm is just as capable, though there was significant FUD thrown around regarding overhead at the time.

[HauntingShock]

Don't know what term I need to use to search at Wiki...but it seems simple "Video" gave me what I want :D

Thanks guys~ I'll drop by whenever I have more questions regarding this.

[smok3]

.how are avi and mkv standards?
.avi is a container.
.different animation formats were available before classical video containers (i don't recall names).
.the transition to 16:9 took over the course of over 10 years (starting at 1990)

[minaust]

what was the video standard before .avi and what year was that.


MS-DOS days - mostly oddball formats. GRASP (?) seemed to be common. A series of low-res B&W dithered still images displayed in rapid (heh) sequence, usually 1-5 secs in length, and were invariably porn.

An occasional mpeg-1 clip would show up on the BBSes, short, small-frame, low frame rate. *IF* you could get the Xing player to work. The first .mpg I ever saw was a silent excerpt from Michael Jackson's "Black and White" video.

Windows 3.x came bundled with the free version of Real Player, so .rm files became popular. Occasional avi's would pop up, usually requiring a codec you didn't have and couldn't get. The codec would usually show up on the same BBS as the video, albeit days later.

I just checked - my 5.1 soundtrack of "Alien" ALONE is approximately 20 times the size of my entire hard drive of that era. Full movies and TV shows didn't become popular until the advent of inexpensive high-density mass storage. The first 1gb hard drives cost $1,000 US.

[Amazingbutbestwishes]

I'm quite sure that you'll get all your answers on Wikipedia.


I agree with what you said. At Wikipedia, enter the keyword - Video Formats, and then you'll find what you need.