This tag is for questions about playback of, creation of, and programmatic interaction with, Audio Video Interleave (*.avi) files. The AVI format was introduced by Microsoft in 1992 and has been widely adopted and modified since, but remains mostly supported on Microsoft devices
The AVI - "Audio Video Interleave" - format was introduced by Microsoft in 1992 and has been widely adopted and modified since, notably with the widely-used file format extensions developed by the Matrox OpenDML group in February 1996.
AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback.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". 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.
Since AVI's introduction in the 1990s, evolving requirements for computerized video files have resulted in many situations that the original AVI spec did not anticipate, and a variety of responses have come forward. As a result, AVI-based videos have fallen victim to some format fragmentation, although there are widely-available codecs and other software (e.g. VLC Player) which can play all major types of video files.
