.DV File Extension

The HD Digital VCR Association developed the DV format in 1994, and Sony, Panasonic, and JVC spearheaded a consortium of video manufacturers that launched the format a year later. It aimed to transition from analog to digital data, offering higher video resolution and improved audio quality.

Popularity and Decline

Amateur and professional users widely used the DV videotape format in the 1990s and 2000s. However, with advancements in camera technology favoring memory cards, solid-state drives for video storage, and more advanced video file formats, the use of DV tapes declined rapidly in the 2010s. Additionally, magnetic tape couldn't keep up with increasing video resolutions and bitrates.

DV Format

DV cameras record video data compressed with the DV codec and uncompressed audio data (4-track 12-bit 32 kHz or 2-track 16-bit 48 kHz) onto magnetic tape in DV cassettes. When transferring video to a computer from a camera via Firewire, the computer may save the data in various DV file formats. Examples include:

• DV-DIF - The raw form of DV, not wrapped in a container, and stored as DV or .DIF files.
• QuickTime-DV - Wrapped in the QuickTime container, primarily used on Macs.
• DV-AVI - Wrapped in the Audio Video Interleave (.AVI) container, primarily used on Windows computers. There are two types: Type-1 (stores interleaved data as one stream) and Type-2 (splits interleaved data into entirely separate video and audio data streams).
• MXF-DV - Wrapped in the Material Exchange Format (.MXF) container.

NOTE: If a DV file contains video saved in a program-specific format, programs that support DV files but not the program-specific format will likely not open it.