As the camcorder users, you must always hear or read that your videos are saved as .MOV format. But what MOV video format really is, I may be you have no a clearly understanding on it.

To have a more explicit on it, here I have collect some information for reference.

We all know that MOV, filename extension for the QuickTime multimedia file format, developed by Apple Computer. It is a file format for storing and playing back movie with sound. This flexible format isn't limited to Macintosh operating systems. But as the Windows Movie Maker cannot accept MOV format videos, we have difficulty on playing MOV videos in Windows systems with Windows Movie Maker without converting MOV videos. But Apple has released QuickTime for windows so if you want to play MOV videos in MPC, you can choose QuickTime for windows.

As QuickTime has the character on cross platform and request the files compressed in small size so use MOV as the way of compressing files would damage video effect, but compare with AVI, it is in a better condition. Till now, there are 4 version of it, among which the version 4.0 is the best one. So if you want to save your video on MOV format, you’d better choose the 4.0 version

Besides, as a multimedia file container, MOV video files contain one or more tracks, each of which has a particular mediastyle: audio, video, text (e.g. for subtitles) and the sample of data for data reference. The sample data can point to the local either document or the document on internet or any other place. Each track either contains a digitally-encoded media stream (using a specific codec) or a data reference to the media stream located in another file. Tracks are maintained in a hierarchal data structure consisting of objects called atoms. An atom can be a parent to other atoms or it can contain media or edit data, but it cannot do both.

Also, in MOV files, you can use different way to compress the audio files for that they have different tracks, such as you can own a MOV video files which contain.MP3 and MPEG-4 track at the same time.

In fact, it is enough for the common use MOV files. When you play MOV with Windows Movie Maker, do not forget to convert MOV videos.

If you want to how to convert MOV videos to Windows Movie Maker, you can reader the article: Video Converter for Windows Movie Maker