Open MP4 File

WMV File

WMV file extension is used to store files in Windows Media Video format. WMV is a media container file format introduced by Microsoft in 2003 and officially approved as a standard in 2006. WMV standard is better known as VC-1 (or SMPTE 421M).

WMV based VC-1 is one of the three standards used for Blu-Ray disks. Also, HD DVD and Microsoft Silverlight had support for VC-1. VC-1 is an official video standard for Microsoft Xbox 360 and it was frequently used for in-game video fragments. VC-1 files could also be read on Playstation 3 and with ffmpeg decoder. In 2012 the Raspberry Pi foundation announced hardware support for VC-1.

WMV uses ASF or Advanced Systems Format (formerly Advanced Streaming Format, Active Streaming Format) as a container format. This container format is part of Microsoft Media Foundation Framework. You should not confuse files with ASF extensions from files with WMV extensions. Even though they use the same container format they support a different set of codecs.

WMV uses its own codec known as Windows Media Video. This format is a competitor to MPEG-4, RealVideo and AVS. WMV 9 is a new profile in Windows Media Video which can support higher resolutions of 720p and 1080p. WMV 9 also added support for interlaced video, frame interpolation and non-square pixels.

Windows Media Video Screen (WMV Screen) file format was designed for screencasts. This file format is optimized to capture static video sequences with small number of colors involved. Most popular use of this format is for computer instruction videos.

Windows Media Video Screen (WMV Screen) file format is used for slideshows. This format supports various transition effects between slides with specific timing.

Audio in WMV is typically encoded with Windows Media Audio codec.

WMV files also support DRM protection which was criticized by users due to problems with ability to restore licenses for WMV files.

WMV files are transferred over e-mail or internet using video/x-ms-wmv multipurpose internet mail extensions (MIME) type.