I know there are some formats that are for raw files, but most others are compressed. Why are there so many of those?
In: Technology
These formats were all invented at different times in computer tech history, under different constraints.
A lot of early image formats, were devised to go with a particular OS or computer hardware, and the format’s colour scheme matched up with the colours that computer was capable of producing, etc. An early frontrunner as a standard was .bmp or “bitmap”, which was supported by a wide variety of systems including Windows, Macintosh and Amiga It wasn’t until the Internet started to become important, that interoperability and data compression began to matter – and, critically, intellectual property.
In the early Internet, .gif and .jpeg were the two ruling image formats, and they used quite different types of image compression, and had quite different features. Like .gif could only encode 256 colours, but it could animate. .jpeg could encode millions of colours, but the compression degraded fuzzily and could make text look bad.
And the patents to these formats were owned by different entities – and both of those entities required you to pay a licensing fee if you wanted to make and sell software which used these formats.
And as time went by, the math and computing theory behind data compression was advancing, so people were exploiting newer techniques to get more usable info into less storage space the whole time too.
It was the same with video formats. .mpeg and .avi and .mov (and RealMedia, and some others…) all came with different licensing expenses if you wanted to release software to play them. And the art and science of getting high-resolution video to compress well and look nice, well, there were a lot of approaches with quite different strengths and weaknesses. Around the early 2000s there was a big explosion of different software vendors releasing their own slightly-improved optimized codec as its own uniquely branded and licensed thing, and it became an interoperability nightmare. DivX and XviD were just 2 out of dozens of mutually incompatible and confusingly named formats out there. Various [‘Codec Packs’](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Lite_Codec_Pack) started popping up, to try and give users an easy “this should play most videos you ever find online” bundle.
Each of these formats had a company behind it fighting for market dominance, whereas people writing video player software for end-users, just wanted to be able to support everything without the user having to worry about it.
So the end result is that we have a great big installed base out there in the world, of video and image editing software that can all read and write to a pretty big handful of well-known file formats, and a lot of those format wars are now old enough that the original patents have expired anyway. But that’s the historical reason for having so many. It’s just kind of the messy leftovers of a patent gold-rush.
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