Nullsoft Streaming Video (NSV) was a media

container A container is any receptacle or enclosure for holding a product used in storage, packaging, and transportation, including shipping. Things kept inside of a container are protected on several sides by being inside of its structure. The term ...

designed for

streaming video Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos without a traditional video playback device and the constraints of a typical static broadcasting schedule. In the 20th century, broadcasting in the form of ...

content over the Internet. NSV was developed by

Nullsoft Nullsoft, Inc. was an American software house founded in Sedona, Arizona, in 1997 by Justin Frankel. Its products included the Winamp media player and the SHOUTcast MP3 streaming media server. In later years, their open source installer ...

, the makers of

Winamp Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Since ve ...

. The NSV format is another example of streaming video formats, offered by various companies and media players.

Windows Media Windows Media is a discontinued multimedia framework for media creation and distribution for Microsoft Windows. It consists of a software development kit (SDK) with several application programming interfaces (API) and a number of prebuilt techn ...

QuickTime File Format QuickTime File Format (QTFF) is a computer file format used natively by the QuickTime framework. Design The format specifies a multimedia container file that contains one or more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of data: audio, ...

and

RealMedia RealMedia is a proprietary multimedia container format created by RealNetworks with the filename extension . RealMedia is generally used in conjunction with RealVideo and RealAudio, while also being used for streaming content over the Internet. ...

streams are just a few examples of these, and each have their benefits and shortcomings. NSV, by default configuration, used

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

as its standard audio format, with VP3 as the video format. Various hacks and codec installations allowed NSV to use

Ogg Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...

for audio and later updates of the VP codecs for video. One of the shortfalls of most streaming formats often comes from the difficulty in finding streams, or at least some form of directory service; and in some cases, none are readily available to the public at all. With Nullsoft's SHOUTcast service, a media streaming and directory system, the NSV format became popular, along with SHOUTcast's listings of Streaming Audio, which reach well into the thousands. The "Media Library" offers integrated listings of both audio and video streams, returned directly from the SHOUTcast service. With Nullsoft's sale to Radionomy in 2014, NSV is no longer supported. The freeware player VLC can be used to convert NSV files into standard video and audio formats like mp4 or mp3.

History

NSV was created in late 2002/early 2003 by

Justin Frankel Justin Frankel (born 1978) is an American computer programmer best known for his work on the Winamp media player application and for inventing the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. Frankel is also the founder of Cockos Incorporated, which creates ...

while working at

. Originally designed as a demonstration of the potential that newly developed streaming technology

Ultravox Ultravox (earlier styled as Ultravox!) were a British new wave band, formed in London in April 1974 as Tiger Lily. Between 1980 and 1986, they scored seven Top Ten albums and seventeen Top 40 singles in the UK, the most successful of which was ...

could offer, it later became an accepted format for AOL streaming media, with many promotional videos available on bot
Winamp.com
and the AOL website.

Players

Current media players that support the Nullsoft Video format are: * GoodPlayer for iOS *

K-Multimedia Player K-Multimedia Player (commonly known as The KMPlayer, KMPlayer or KMP) is an Adware-supported media player for Windows and iOS that can play most current audio and video formats, including VCD, HDML, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg, OGM, 3GP, MPEG-1/2/4, ...

* MoboPlayer for Android *

MPlayer MPlayer is a free and open-source media player software application. It is available for Linux, OS X and Microsoft Windows. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS Research Operating System are also available. A port for DOS using ...

* RealPlayer Plug-In
http://rnsv.hit.bg
* RockPlayer 1.x for Android (not RockPlayer2) * VLC (with

VP6 On2 TrueMotion VP6 is a proprietary lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies. This codec is commonly used by Adobe Flash, Flash Vide ...

support since 0.8.6, can also convert) *

Xine xine is a multimedia playback engine for Unix-like operating systems released under the GNU General Public License. xine is built around a shared library (xine-lib) that supports different frontend player applications. xine uses libraries ...

* mpv

External links

www.nullsoft.com
- Official Nullsoft Video Software Download Site
forums.winamp.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=152
- Official Nullsoft Video Forum
https://web.archive.org/web/20070223003813/http://ultravox.aol.com/NSVFormat.rtf
- NSV Format specification and documentation
Sourceforge.net Project Page: Nsv Lib
- Unofficial Open Source - cross Platform, in development NSV Library in C++
Nullsoft (Streaming, S as in Soft) Video
Last version of the Nullsoft NSV Video Format website, with specifications and samples {{AOL Inc. Digital container formats Streaming television AOL