List of free file formats

A free file format is a file format that is free of any patents or copyright. They should have a freely available specification. Free file formats are good for interoperability and to prevent vendor lock-in. It is a cornerstone in open systems.

Archiving and compression

• 7z — for both archiving and compression.
• SQX — for both archiving and compression.
• PAQ — for compression.
• bzip2 — for compression.
• gzip — for compression.
• Tar — for archiving.

Multimedia

• PNG — lossless compressed format .
• MNG — moving pictures, based on PNG.
• SVG — vector graphics.
• Ogg (A container format).
  • Vorbis — An audio codec.
  • Theora — A video codec.
  • Tarkin — Another video codec.
  • FLAC — Lossless audio codec.
  • Speex — Speech codec.

The Ogg format and the Vorbis codec were developed specifically to compete with the widely-used, but patented MP3 audio compression format.

Text

• HTML/XHTML — markup language for web pages.
• OpenDocument — a formatted text format.
• PDF — Portable Document Format, a document description format.
• PostScript — a page description language and programming language.
• RTF — a formatted text format.
• TXT — a plain text file.

Other

• DjVu — for scanned images.
• NZB — for multipart binary files on Usenet.
• XML — a general-purpose markup language.

See also

• Open format
• Open standard
• Free software
• Open source
• Open source codecs and containers