Format registries are sources of information for the authority control of identifiers of digital representation formats. They general contain detailed information about digital file formats, including their significant properties and requirements for rendering.
PRONOM is the most commonly used file format registry in use by the preservation community. It is often used by digital preservation systems in combination with DROID (Digital Record Object Identification) and JHOVE to perform file format identification, validation and characterization.
Note, not all preservation systems perform these functions. A number of preservation systems perform only bit-level or bit preservation, which preserves content files as submitted, without any file format identification and technical metadata extraction functionality.
For additional information, please see the FLVC Digital Preservation Libguide: https://flvc.libguides.com/digital-preservation