1. Characteristics of container formats

After the section on native formats and "media-essential" compression formats, container formats form the second part of this series of articles devoted to an overview of digital media.

Container formats are the indispensable form for acquiring, recording, searching, consulting, storing, editing, converting, transferring, archiving and distributing these digital media (in their native or compressed format) by encapsulating them, hence the term wrapper, or even more explicitly container (figure 1 ).