3GP is a file format designed for video on mobile phones. 3GP is a container that facilitates the creation, editing, transfer and viewing of video and audio using a 3G mobile phone. It is supported by most smartphones, including the Apple iPhone.
3GP is based on the structure of MPEG-4 Part 14, otherwise known as MP4. 3GP was designed to reduce the overhead in terms of storage and bandwidth to allow video files that could be handled by smartphones.
Associated programs
QuickTime Player VLC Media Player Windows Media Player
Using Zamzar it is possible to convert 3GP files to a variety of other formats:
3gp to 3g2 (3GPP2 Multimedia File) 3gp to aac (Advanced Audio Coding File) 3gp to ac3 (AC3 Audio File) 3gp to avi (Windows video file) 3gp to flac (Free Lossless Audio Codec) 3gp to flv (Flash video) 3gp to gif (Compuserve graphics interchange) 3gp to ipad (MPEG-4 (H264) Video File) 3gp to ipod (MPEG-4 Video File) 3gp to mov (Apple QuickTime Movie) 3gp to mp3 (Compressed audio file) 3gp to mp4 (MPEG-4 Video File) 3gp to mpg (Moving Picture Experts Group File) 3gp to ogg (Ogg Vorbis Compressed Audio File) 3gp to wav (Windows audio file) 3gp to webm (Multimedia Container Format) 3gp to wmv (Windows Media Video)
MP3 is a digital music format which allows CD tracks to be reduced to around a tenth of their normal size without a significant loss of quality. MP3 gets rid of a lot of the information recorded in a song that our ears are not able to hear and then uses complex algorithms to reduce the file size. This then enables you to get hundreds of songs on to a CD and it also has opened up a new market over the internet - the download market as download times have been significantly reduced.
The MP3 format is a lossy format. That means that an MP3 file does not contain 100% of the original audio information. Instead, MP3 files use perceptual coding. In other words, that means it removes the information that your ear doesn't notice thereby making the file smaller. The reason lossy formats are used over RAW is that RAW audio files are too large to travel over the internet at any great speed. By using lossy formats it enables even dial up users to download mp3 files at a reasonable speed. RAW file formats generally require 176,000 bytes per second compared to a lossy format which requires 17,600. The difference is massive and so are the download times.
