File Formats

File formats represent data types contained in a file. For each data type, it is a couple of file formats to save these data as a file.

Common File Types and Formats

Typical examples of files are are:

Document files, including plain text files, formatted text files, vocabularies.
Multimedia files, i.e., audio files, video files, graphic files, 3D files and other.
Program files, for example, batch and script files, executable programs and libraries.
Project files, including application data files, projects, object files, help files and config files.
Other file types, i.e., drive images, virtual machines, database table files, memory dump etc.

Different File Formats for a Single Type

For each file type, this is a couple of file formats. Let us show this for some categories.

Plain text files are a basic format for any file containing the text information. However, these files have a difference by encoding according to an OS used (ASCII files, Unicode files, Mac OS X files etc.), and also by a symbol (or a combination of symbols) used for ending a single string.
Video files have many formats, including MPEG4, OGG, MOV, 3GP and some other popular formats. The principal difference between formats is a type of codec (a service utility used to encode or decode videos) and other video software.

How to Know a File Format?

Traditionally, the main method to show a format for a single file is its file extension. For most common formats, these are also one of two bytes (symbols) at the beginning of a file, which defines what the type of information the file carries.