Mitten Music

As the internet progresses the transferring of files as become more prevalent in the community. P2P is peer to peer transferring and can be done in a variety of ways. These p2p networks allow a variety of different types of files to be transferred. Usually file in P2P network is not stored on a single computer but is broken in chunks and each chunk ends up on a different computer. And each computer will have a file which describes which chunks are store on it. For example on BitTorrent P2P network such information is stored in files with File Extension TORRENT

When computers first came online one of the primary reasons was to transfer information. As people started sending files over the internet the idea of compression took off. Most people look a *.zip as the first format they used. For the more serious file transferring people there where a variety of tools that came from the start such as *.rar and *.arj. All of these took either a single file or a group of files and placed them in file under their extension in one file that was a smaller size than the originals.

Document files are usually a text file that is created to store a document primarily on a computer. They are used for a few other instances such as in binary files but for most uses it is a form of text file. Currently most would agree that the standard is File Extension DOC as these are the files that come from the popular Microsoft Word program. Many programs are able to open these files but since *.doc is a licensed property of Microsoft it is a proprietary format so it is not opened by all word processors. The two original formats in the window field have *.txt that is a plain text document which is used with Notepad in Windows. Secondly is *.rtf that has been used in Microsoft Works and other document programs. RTF is generally viewed as a format that can be exported reliably to another format.

I've been always interested in what is hiding behind all the video and audio information we watch every day on our computers. So I decided to dig a bit on this topic and figure out what different file formats exists.After investigating this topic a little I came to a conclusion that knowing them all is just impossible since there are hundreds exist. It looks like at the birth of computer video and audio every company introduced its own file format. And even though only some survived there are still quite a lot of them. Here is a short list: MP4, Quicktime, MP3, AVI, DIVX, BIN, WAV, WMA, MP2, FLV and many many more.