AVAide Software ^{for you}

AVI stands for Audio Video Interleave. It is a special case of the RIFF (Resource Interchange File Format). AVI is defined by Microsoft. AVI is the most common format for audio/video data on the PC. AVI is an example of a de facto (by fact) standard.

Audio Visual Interleave (.avi)

loadTOCNode(3, 'summary'); Versions of Windows Media Player that support this file type:

•	Windows Media Player 7
•	Windows Media Player for Windows XP
•	Windows Media Player 9 Series
•	Windows Media Player 10
•	Windows Media Player 11

Audio Video Interleave (AVI) is a special case of Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF). AVI is defined by Microsoft. The .avi file format is the most common format for audio and video data on a computer.

Audio content or video content that is compressed with a wide variety of codecs can be stored in an .avi file and played in Windows Media Player, if the appropriate codecs are installed on the computer. Video codecs that are frequently used in .avi files include the following codecs:

•	DivX codec For more information, visit the following DivX Web site: http://www.divx.com (http://www.divx.com)
•	Cinepak codec For more information, visit the following Cinepak Web site: http://www.cinepak.com (http://www.cinepak.com)
•	Indeo codec For more information, visit the following Ligos Web site: http://www.ligos.com (http://www.ligos.com)
•	DV codec
•	MJPEG codec
•	Uncompressed RGB or YUY2 codec

Audio codecs that are frequently used in .avi files include the following audio codecs:

•	MP3 codec
•	Microsoft Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation (MS ADPCM)
•	Uncompressed Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) codec

by Edward Sun

AVI Video on PC's is cool - you can download video files off the Web, and you capture clips on your home PC to share with friends. There's a standard audio / video file format under Windows called AVI (Audio Video Interleave), and Windows 9x comes with the built-in ability to play these AVI files right on your system.

 

AVI is a derivative of the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF), which divides a file's data into blocks, or "chunks." Each "chunk" is identified by a FourCC tag. An AVI file takes the form of a single chunk in a RIFF formatted file, which is then subdivided into two mandatory "chunks" and one optional "chunk". The entire structure of a RIFF file was copied from an earlier IFF format devised by Electronic Arts in the mid-1980s[citation needed], the primary difference being the "endianness" of integers. In fact, even a properly written IFF parser for the now old-aged AmigaOS, (after correcting for endianness) will parse RIFF files.

The first sub-chunk is identified by the "hdrl" tag. This sub-chunk is the file header and contains metadata about the video, such as its width, height and frame rate. The second sub-chunk is identified by the "movi" tag. This chunk contains the actual audio/visual data that make up the AVI movie. The third optional sub-chunk is identified by the "idx1" tag which indexes the physical addresses [within the file] of the data chunks.

By way of the RIFF format, the audio/visual data contained in the "movi" chunk can be encoded or decoded by software called a codec, which is an abbreviation for (en)coder/decoder. Upon creation of the file, the codec translates between raw data and the (compressed) data format used inside the chunk. An AVI file may carry audio/visual data inside the chunks in virtually any compression scheme, including Full Frame (Uncompressed), Intel Real Time (Indeo), Cinepak, Motion JPEG, Editable MPEG, VDOWave, ClearVideo / RealVideo, QPEG, and MPEG-4 Video.

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