MPEG-4 Part 14
MP4 is the most widely supported video container format, typically pairing H.264 video with AAC audio. It's the default format for video recorded on phones and shared online.
Extensions
.mp4
MIME type(s)
video/mp4
Compression
Lossy
Transparency
Not supported
Advantages
- Plays natively on virtually every device and browser
- Good compression-to-quality ratio for video
- Can store video, audio, and subtitle tracks together
Disadvantages
- Not ideal for further lossless editing without re-encoding
- Extracting just the audio requires re-encoding to an audio format
Common uses
- Phone and camera video recordings
- Video shared on the web and social media
- Source material for extracting audio (e.g. to MP3)
How to open a MP4 file
Plays natively in every modern browser and video player, on desktop and mobile.