File Format Reference

Portable Network Graphics, a lossless raster image format.

A lossy-compressed raster image format, ubiquitous for photos.

Graphics Interchange Format — indexed-color raster images and simple animation.

Windows Bitmap, an uncompressed (or lightly compressed) raster image format.

Tagged Image File Format, a flexible raster container used in scanning and print.

Windows icon file, containing one or more small raster images.

Google's WebP format, a RIFF container for lossy or lossless images.

AV1 Image File Format, a modern still-image format based on the AV1 video codec.

High Efficiency Image Container, Apple's default photo format since iOS 11.

High Efficiency Image Format, the general still-image profile of the HEIF container.

Scalable Vector Graphics, an XML-based vector image format.

MPEG-4 Part 14, the standard ISO-BMFF container for video/audio on the web.

Apple QuickTime container, the ancestor of the modern MP4 format.

Apple's MPEG-4 video variant, commonly DRM-wrapped iTunes video.

3GPP multimedia container, designed for mobile phones.

An open, royalty-free video container built on Matroska/EBML.

Matroska, an open multimedia container supporting nearly any codec.

Audio Video Interleave, Microsoft's classic RIFF video container.

MPEG-1/2 Audio Layer III, the ubiquitous lossy audio format.

Free Lossless Audio Codec, a lossless compressed audio format.

Waveform Audio, an uncompressed (typically PCM) RIFF audio container.

Ogg container, commonly wrapping Vorbis/Opus audio or Theora video.

MPEG-4 audio, typically AAC-encoded, in an ISO-BMFF container.

A ZIP archive — also the container format underlying docx/xlsx/pptx, jar, apk and epub.

Gzip-compressed data, typically wrapping a single file or a tarball.

Bzip2-compressed data, using the Burrows-Wheeler block-sorting algorithm.

XZ-compressed data, typically using the LZMA2 algorithm.

Zstandard-compressed data, a fast modern compression format from Meta.

A 7-Zip archive, usually with a high compression ratio via LZMA/LZMA2.

A RAR archive using the RAR 5.0 format.

A RAR archive using the RAR 1.5-4.x format.

A POSIX tape archive — an uncompressed sequential-file container.

An Android application package — a ZIP archive of compiled code, resources and a manifest.

A Java Archive — a ZIP bundling compiled .class files and a manifest.

Portable Document Format, Adobe's fixed-layout document standard.

Rich Text Format, a cross-platform formatted-text document format.

Compound File Binary format — the legacy container behind .doc/.xls/.ppt and .msi installers.

A Microsoft Word document in the Office Open XML format.

A Microsoft Excel workbook in the Office Open XML format.

A Microsoft PowerPoint presentation in the Office Open XML format.

An EPUB e-book — a ZIP archive containing XHTML content and a manifest.

A SQLite database file, a self-contained embedded SQL database.

Apache Parquet, a columnar storage format for big-data analytics.

Executable and Linkable Format — the Linux/Unix binary and shared-object format.

Portable Executable — the Windows .exe/.dll binary format.

A macOS/iOS Mach-O executable, dylib or bundle.

A macOS universal (fat) Mach-O binary bundling multiple architectures.

Compiled Java bytecode, executed by the JVM.

A compiled WebAssembly binary module.

Dalvik Executable format — compiled bytecode for the Android runtime.

A TrueType outline font.

An OpenType font, typically with CFF/PostScript outlines.

Web Open Font Format — a compressed wrapper around TTF/OTF for the web.

Web Open Font Format 2 — a Brotli-compressed successor to WOFF.

Plain text encoded as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark.

Extensible Markup Language, a general-purpose structured text format.

HyperText Markup Language, the structure format of web pages.

JavaScript Object Notation, a lightweight structured data format.