AVI

AVI, an acronym for Audio Video Interleave, is a file format designed to store both audio and video data in a standard package to allow its simultaneous playback.

It is a special case of the RIFF (Resource Interchange File Format), which divides the file's data up into data blocks called "chunks". Each "chunk" is identified by a FourCC tag. An AVI file takes the form of a single chunk in an RIFF formatted file, which is then subdivided into two mandatory "chunks" and one optional "chunk".

The first sub-chunk is identified by the "hdrl" tag. This chunk is the file header and contains metadata about the video such as the width, height and the number of frames. The second sub-chunk is identified by the "movi" tag. This chunk contains the actual audio/visual data that makes up the AVI movie. The third optional sub-chunk is identified by the "idxl" tag and indexes the location of the data chunks within the file.

By way of the RIFF format, the audio/visual data contained in the "movi" chunk can be encoded with many different codecs.

The AVI format is defined by Microsoft.

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