Supported Video Audio Formats Blender Manual

Video Formats
These formats are primarily used for compressing rendered sequences into a playable movie (they can also be used to make plain audio files).

A codec is a little routine that compresses the video so that it will fit on a Blu-ray, or be able to be streamed out over the Internet, over a cable, or just be a reasonable file size. Codecs compress the channels of a video down to save space and enable continuous playback.Lossy codecs make smaller files at the expense of image quality, while lossless codecs compress as much as possible the video, but without losing any existing data.

Some codecs, like H.264, are great for larger images. Codecs are used to encode and decode the movie, and so must be present on both the encoding machine (Blender) and the target machine. The results of the encoding are stored in a container file.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of codecs, including Xvid, H.264, DivX, Microsoft, and so on. Each has advantages and disadvantages, and compatibility with different players on different operating systems.

Note

Most codecs can only compress the RGB or YUV colors, but some support the Alpha channel as well. Codecs that support RGBA include:

Blender offers three ways to export videos, in the File Format selector of the Output properties:

AVI JPEGAVI but with JPEG compression. Lossy, smaller files but not as small as you can get with a Codec compression algorithm. JPEG compression is also the one used in the DV format used in digital camcorders.

AVI RawAudio-Video Interlaced (AVI) uncompressed frames.

FFmpeg VideoVideo encoding via the FFmpeg library. Which codecs are available depends on the operating system and FFmpeg version. This options allows for a lot of different encodings, some presets are available (to the right of the Encoding subpanel) to help with getting started. This option is also the only one allowing to export audio.