EVERY FORMAT
IMAGINABLE.
A living catalog of 198+ file formats — their history, strengths, quirks, and how to convert them without losing quality.
Images
53 formats — raster, vector, and RAW
Video
30 codecs and containers
High-fidelity encoding for pro workflows and web-optimized delivery. H.264, H.265, AV1, and VP9 all covered.
Archive & Compression
Industrial-grade compression for ZIP, RAR, 7Z and specialized packaging formats. Extract or repackage without quality loss.
FEATURED
STORIES.
Long-form articles on the most requested formats — how they started, where they fit, and what they quietly do well.
JPEG Image
JPEG was defined in 1992 by the Joint Photographic Experts Group — a committee of researchers from ISO, IEC, a...
Read more pngPNG Image
PNG was born out of a licensing dispute. In 1994 Unisys announced it would enforce a patent on the LZW compres...
Read more mp4MP4 Video
MP4 — formally MPEG-4 Part 14 — shipped in 2003 as the standard container for MPEG-4 media. It was based on Ap...
Read more mp3MP3 Audio
MP3 — MPEG-1 Audio Layer III — was developed through the 1980s at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, led by...
Read more pdfPDF Document
PDF — Portable Document Format — was born inside Adobe in the early 1990s from a project called "Camelot" led...
Read more webpWebP Image
WebP came out of Google's acquisition of On2 Technologies in 2010. On2 had developed the VP8 video codec, and...
Read more docxWord Document
DOCX is the XML-based successor to the legacy binary .doc format that ruled office work from 1983. When Micros...
Read more gifGIF Image
GIF — Graphics Interchange Format — was released by CompuServe in 1987 to send small images over dial-up bulle...
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