Database

A protocol and file format that stores musical performance data (notes, timing, velocity) rather than audio, enabling instrument control and music composition.

MKV is an open, flexible multimedia container format that can hold virtually any combination of video, audio, subtitle, and metadata tracks in a single file.

Amazon's proprietary ebook formats for Kindle devices and apps, including MOBI (Mobipocket), AZW, and AZW3/KF8, supporting DRM-protected reflowable content.

MOV is Apple's QuickTime multimedia container format, widely used in professional video production on macOS and iOS, and the structural basis for the MP4 format.

The most widely adopted lossy audio compression format, balancing file size and audio quality for music distribution and playback.

MP4/M4V MPEG-4 container format supporting H.264/H.265 video, AAC audio, and subtitles — the dominant video format on the modern web and in consumer devices.

MPEG-DASH is the ISO-standard adaptive bitrate streaming protocol using MPD manifests and segmented media, widely used for DRM-protected and cross-platform video delivery.

MessagePack binary serialization — a compact, fast binary format that is like JSON but smaller and faster, used for caching, IPC, and network protocols.

MXF is the SMPTE-standardized professional container format for broadcast and post-production, designed for interoperable exchange of video, audio, and metadata between systems.

Newline-Delimited JSON — a text format with one JSON object per line, designed for streaming, logging, and processing large datasets line-by-line.

Apple's proprietary spreadsheet format for the Numbers application, featuring a canvas-based design with multiple tables per sheet, part of the iWork suite.

The OBJ 3D model format — a simple, human-readable text format for 3D geometry with broad support across modeling, rendering, and game development tools.

The open standard spreadsheet format from the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) family, used by LibreOffice Calc, Apache OpenOffice, and other applications for spreadsheet documents.

The open standard document format from the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) family, used by LibreOffice, Apache OpenOffice, and other applications for word processing documents.

An open-source, royalty-free lossy audio codec in the Ogg container, offering quality comparable to or better than MP3 without patent restrictions.

A modern, open-source, royalty-free audio codec excelling at both speech and music across a wide bitrate range, with ultra-low latency for real-time communication.

The OpenType font format — the modern standard for digital typography, extending TrueType with PostScript outlines, advanced layout features, and cross-platform support.

Apple's proprietary word processing and page layout format for the Pages application, part of the iWork suite, with tight Apple ecosystem integration and dual word-processing/layout modes.

Apache Parquet columnar storage format — a highly efficient binary format for analytics workloads, supporting compression and encoding optimizations.

Adobe's universal document format for fixed-layout, platform-independent document exchange with support for text, images, vector graphics, forms, and digital signatures.

PNG is a lossless compressed raster image format with full alpha transparency

The modern Microsoft PowerPoint presentation format based on Open XML, storing slides, layouts, themes, animations, and media in a ZIP-compressed package of XML files.

Apple ProRes is a family of lossy and visually lossless video codecs designed for high-quality professional video editing, post-production, and broadcast delivery.

Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) — Google's language-neutral binary serialization format for structured data, used in gRPC, inter-service communication, and data storage.

PSD is Adobe Photoshop's native file format, preserving layers, masks, blend

QOI (Quite OK Image Format) is a simple, fast lossless image format designed

The RAR archive format — proprietary compression with strong encryption, recovery records, and multi-volume splitting for high-ratio archiving.

RAW files contain minimally processed sensor data from digital cameras,

The RPM package format — Red Hat's software package manager for installing, updating, and managing applications on Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, SUSE, and other enterprise Linux distributions.

A Microsoft-developed text-based document interchange format that encodes formatted text with control words, providing cross-platform rich text exchange without binary complexity.

Structured Query Language files — text files containing database queries for schema definition, data manipulation, migrations, and seed data.

SQLite single-file relational database — a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration SQL database engine stored as a single cross-platform file.

The STEP file format — the ISO standard for exchanging complete CAD product data including 3D geometry, tolerances, materials, and assembly structure across engineering tools.

The STL 3D model format — the standard for 3D printing, representing surface geometry as a mesh of triangles in either ASCII or binary encoding.

SVG is an XML-based vector image format for two-dimensional graphics that

The TAR archive format — Unix/Linux standard for bundling files while preserving permissions, ownership, and symlinks, typically paired with a compression layer.

TGA (Targa) is a raster image format supporting alpha channels and simple

TIFF is a flexible, high-quality raster image format widely used in

Tom's Obvious Minimal Language — a configuration file format emphasizing readability with explicit, unambiguous semantics. Used by Cargo, pyproject.toml, and Hugo.

A plain-text tabular data format using tab characters as field delimiters, avoiding the quoting complexities of CSV and widely used in bioinformatics, linguistics, and data processing.

The TrueType font format — Apple and Microsoft's scalable font technology using quadratic Bezier outlines, the foundation of digital typography on every major platform.

The simplest document format — unformatted text encoded in character sets like UTF-8, ASCII, or Latin-1, readable by virtually every computing device and application.

The USDZ format — Apple's AR-ready 3D file format based on Pixar's USD, designed for sharing immersive 3D content on iOS, macOS, and visionOS.

Variable fonts — a single font file containing a continuous range of styles (weight, width, slant, optical size) controlled by design axes, replacing entire font families.

vCard (.vcf) contact format — the universal standard (RFC 6350) for exchanging electronic business card and contact information between applications.

WebAssembly (Wasm) binary format — a portable, high-performance binary instruction format for running compiled code in browsers and server-side runtimes.

The standard uncompressed audio format for Windows, storing raw PCM audio data with full fidelity for professional editing and archival.

WebM is an open, royalty-free multimedia container format developed by Google for the web, using VP8, VP9, or AV1 video with Vorbis or Opus audio.

WebP is a modern image format developed by Google that provides both lossy and

Microsoft's proprietary audio codec family for the Windows platform, including lossy, lossless, and professional variants.

WMV is Microsoft's proprietary video codec and format, used within the ASF container, once common for Windows-based media distribution and streaming.

The WOFF and WOFF2 web font formats — compressed font containers optimized for efficient web delivery, enabling custom typography on websites with smaller file sizes.

XCF is the native file format for GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program),

The legacy binary spreadsheet format used by Microsoft Excel from 1997 through 2003, storing worksheets, formulas, and formatting in an OLE2 compound file structure.

The modern Microsoft Excel spreadsheet format based on Open XML, storing worksheets, formulas, charts, pivot tables, and formatting in a ZIP-compressed package of XML files.

Extensible Markup Language — a verbose but powerful structured data format widely used in enterprise systems, document formats, and legacy APIs.

The XZ compression format — high-ratio single-stream compression using LZMA2, the modern standard for software distribution as tar.xz on Linux.

YAML Ain't Markup Language — a human-friendly data serialization format popular for configuration files, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code.

The ZIP archive format — structure, creation, extraction, encryption, and cross-platform compatibility for the most widely used compressed archive format.

The Zstandard (zstd) compression format — Facebook's modern compressor offering dramatically better speed-to-ratio tradeoffs than gzip, with dictionary support and streaming capabilities.