What you NEED to know before touching a video file
type: NewsArticle
description: The article explains that video files consist of two distinct components: a container format (like .mp4 or .mkv) that packages the data, and a separate video coding format (like H.264 or H.265) that actually compresses and encodes the video. It warns beginners that simply changing a file's extension or container does not alter the underlying video encoding, and that misunderstanding this distinction leads to common, time-consuming mistakes.
date published: 2025-05-22T20:23:49+00:00
date modified: 2026-05-23T02:03:04+00:00
language: en
is accessible for free: true
article body: # What you NEED to Know Before Touching a Video File Hanging out in subtitling and video re-editing communities, I see my fair share of novice video editors and video encoders, and see plenty of them make the classic beginner mistakes when it comes to working with videos. A man can only read "Use Handbrake to convert your mkv to an mp4 :)" so many times before losing it, so I am writing this article to channel the resulting psychic damage into something productive. If you are new to working with videos (or, let's face it, even if you aren't), please read through this guide to avoid making mistakes that can cost you lots of time, computing power, storage space, or video quality. This guide is quite long. This is hard to avoid since videos are *really, really complicated*, and there are lots of misconceptions to clear up. I have tried to keep the different sections as independent as possible so you do not have to read the whole thing at once. ## The Anatomy of a Video File and Remuxing vs. Reencoding Let's start out with the most important thing: The mistake I see the most and that causes experienced users the most pain to see. To efficiently work with video files, you need to know the (extreme) basics of how video files are stored: When you download video files or copy them somewhere, you may come across various types of videos. You'll probably see file extensions like `.mp4` or `.mkv` (or many others like `.webm`, `.mov`, `.avi`, `.m2ts`, and so on). As a newcomer to video you might be tempted to think that this file extension is what determines the video format. You might have found an `mkv` file somewhere and noticed that Vegas or Premiere cannot open it, so you searched for ways to convert your `mkv` file to an `mp4` file. While this is technically not wrong, it's far from the full story and can cause lots of misconceptions. In reality, all these formats are so-called *container formats*. The job of an `mkv` or `mp4` file is not to compress and encode the video, …
publisher: Web Pulse
mentions: Handbrake
citation: CreativeWork