List of file formats

Here are some important computer file formats:

• Audio file formats
  • Lossless
    • Uncompressed
      • AIFF
      • au
      • CDDA
      • IFF-8SVX
      • IFF-16SV
      • RAW (raw samples without any header or sync)
      • WAV
    • Compressed
      • Flac[?] (free as in freedom)
  • Lossy
    • MP2
    • MP3
    • Speex (Ogg project, specialized for voice, low bitrates)
    • Vorbis (Ogg project, free and similar in principle to MP3)
    • WMA
    • MPC
  • Music formats
    • MID (standard MIDI file; most often just notes and controls but occasionally also sample dumps)
    • NSF[?] (bytecode program to play NES music)
    • MOD (Soundtracker and Protracker sample and melody modules)
    • S3M (ScreamTracker 3 module, with a few more effects and a dedicated volume column)
    • XM (FastTracker module, adding instrument envelopes)
    • IT (Impulse Tracker module, adding compressed samples, note-release actions, and more effects including a resonant filter)
• Document formats - These are ways of storing mainly text
  • ASCII (.txt)
  • Amigaguide
  • HTML (.html, .htm)
  • Radix-64
  • RTF (a textual encoding of the data in a Word DOC; many programs' Word export filters actually write RTF as RTF is much easier to generate reliably)
  • TeX
  • Troff
  • Word (.doc) (Format revised and altered very often; little official documentation)
  • XML
• Raster image or graphics file formats
  • GIF (often avoided because of patent problems)
  • MSP (Anceint file format used by old versions of Microsoft paint, replaced with bmp in Windows 3.0)
  • IFF-ILBM (.lbm)
  • JNG (single-frame MNG with JPEG data and possibly an alpha channel)
  • JPEG JFIF (.jpg or .jpeg) (lossy, recommended for display of photographic images)
  • PCX
  • PNG (lossless, recommended for display and edition of graphic images)
  • PPM
  • PSD
  • TIFF (.tif or .tiff) (lossless, many variant exist)
• Vector image formats
  • CGM[?] Computer Graphics Metafile an ISO Standard
  • DXF
  • SVG
  • Scene description languages[?] (3D vector image formats)
    • MOVIE.BYU[?]
    • RenderMan
    • VRML
• Object code file formats[?]
  • a.out (Unix and GCC only, not technically a file format)
  • ELF
  • MZ EXE[?] (.exe; used in MS-DOS)
  • PE (.exe; used in Microsoft Windows and some other systems)
• Page description languages
  • DVI
  • PCL
  • PDF
  • PostScript (.ps, .ps.gz)

• Hypertext description
  • HTML
  • CSS
• Data exchange
  • XML
  • SDXF (Structured Data Exchange Format)
• Tabulated data
  • tab
  • csv[?] (comma separated values)
  • dif[?] (accessible by many spreadsheet applications)
• Archiving and compression formats[?]
  • arj
  • bzip2 (.bz2)
  • gzip (.gz)
  • LHA (.lzh)
  • lzo[?]
  • lzx[?]
  • zip
  • rar[?]
  • tar
  • .tar.gz (gzipped tar file)
  • zoo[?]
• Video file formats
  • Animated GIF[?] (simple animation; often avoided because of patent problems)
  • ASF (ASF is a shell, which enables any form of compression to be used, MPEG4 is common)
  • AVI (AVI is a shell, which enables any form of compression to be used, MPEG and a variation on MPEG4 are common)
  • Macromedia Flash (.swf) (complex vector-based animation with sound and interactivity)
  • Matroska (*.mkv) (Matroska is a shell, which enables any form of compression to be used, MPEG4 is common)
  • MNG (mainly simple animation containing PNG and JPEG objects, often somewhat more complex than animated GIF)
  • MPEG
  • Tarkin (Ogg project)
  • Theora (Ogg project)
  • OGM (OGM is a shell, which enables any form of compression to be used, MPEG4 is common))
  • QuickTime
  • RealMedia
• Disk images (a file system used as a random-access archive file inside another file system; extensions include .img and .iso)
• Native data (registered objective parametrs .dat .cop .par )

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A good source of information on file formats is the Wotsit archive at http://www.wotsit.org