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I have always been a bit puzzled about how audio/video file formats work, and how the extension of a media file (e.g. mp4) doesn't always tell the whole story about what media formats the file contains and how it is encoded. I am starting to learn about the existence of container formats and codecs, and would like to learn this hands-on by looking at some actual media files.
A while back a friend showed me a program that can inspect a media file and draw a diagram of what is contained in the file. I remember these diagrams looked a bit like flowcharts. Does this ring a bell for anyone?
I am also interested if anyone has other recommendations for other good ways to learn how multimedia file formats work.
Note that rendering filters are part of the directshow framework; software may choose to render without using a multimedia framework, but it is generally better/easier to use the framework. Also directshow is outdated nowadays in favor of WMF. – jiggunjer – 2015-12-18T02:19:20.130