Talk:Audio Video Interleave

Rework of "continued use"

"Continued use" struck me as a mish-mash of clearly argumentative edits which had produced a poorly-written result. I see a lot of AVI files because I work in film and TV postproduction; I therefore have absolutely no axe to grind as regards what formats people want to use to "back things up" and hold films on their hard disks. I hope my edits reflect that disinterest.

I've written up a summary of what AVI doesn't do; these are simple enough facts about the format which are both encyclopedic in general and relevant to the article.

I removed the discussion of DMF. There's a lot of competing formats and it's not the right place to pick one for discussion. If it really is technologically related to RIFF AVI, then maybe it deserves a mention somewhere in the article, but not under "continued use". And is it really encyclopedic? I've never heard of it.

Anyway, hope this gets us back to "just the facts". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.85.166.113 (talk) 22:39, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

OpenDML

Should OpenDML redirect to AVI? If so, should "OpenDML" be linked in the AVI page?

The same ----- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Interleave

Disambig for Avi?

Is it not possible to add a disambiguity page here? I'd like to write an article about the author named Avi. I'm sort of new to this, and don't quite know how to do the disambiguity thing. Thanks.

--Jberk 18:33, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia is case sensitive. The authors name is Avi, not AVI. No need for a disambig page at AVI. AlistairMcMillan 03:06, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hey... Using this nk for .avi

Acronym

I've never known "avee" or "ahveye" (or similar) to mean AVI. I have only ever heard people say "Ay vee eye", which would make this an initialism, right? (I know we're pedantic about the little things, eh?) Please confirm that this is an acronym, or let's change it. --202.164.194.254 03:40, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

For me it's the other way around, I've never ever heard anyone pronounce the letters independently --129.125.101.92 11:17, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

How is it usually pronounced? ay-vee? ah-vee? ay-vye? ah-vye? --Austrian (talk) 20:45, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

The letters are pronounced independently. "ay-vee-eye" At least according to the original Video for Windows official disc for Windows 3.1 from Microsoft which had a video documentary on PC multimedia. :) - xpclient ^Talk 20:57, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Yeah but stupid people try to pronounce it as a word. How do people pronounce wmv, wma, tga or rgb? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.185.6.18 (talk) 22:51, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

contradictory

the article describes avi's obsolescence, and then gives a contradictory external link (myths about avi). in other words, wtf?

incomplete avi files

Incomplete avi files can be played by generating the index on the fly. Try truncating a file an avi file and putting it in the player from www.divx.com The player will pause for a few seconds and then play as much of the video as is in the file.

ffdshow codec pack and vlc

ffdshow is not a codec pack but a direct show filter. and imho vlc is overestimated as a magic bullet to solve all problems.

Peculiar style

What's all this <tt> usage about? --ToobMug 15:38, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Beats me. Since there seems to be no justification for it, I've removed it. -dmmaus 23:55, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Continued use?

I think this section is in accurate. AVI is still widely used amoung video artist, VJ's and filmakers. I think this section should be re-written. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gumbertron (talk • contribs) 12:46, 1 March 2007 (UTC).

What exactly is inaccurate about it? The section does not say AVI is not widely used anymore. The fact that it's (considered to be) technically obsolete does not imply people don't use it. Actually, the last paragraph explicitely says that even though better and more advanced formats exist these days, AVI still remains popular thanks to compatibility with existing tools. The same with the MP3 format, for example — many better, more modern and efficient audio compressions have been available for years, yet MP3 still remains the most famous audio format, despite its inferiority. —J. M. 13:11, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

"AVI is considered by some to be an outdated container format." By who? This needs a citation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.197.54.247 (talk) 20:43, 14 January 2008 (UTC) I'd suggest this is a weasel-words tactic by a proponent of newer Open Source formats, ie: OGG or MKV. The 15+ year-old AVI format does not natively support all features of a year-old video codec, and this defines it as 'outdated'? Tell that to all the manufacturers of hardware with AVI file playback capabilities nowadays. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.64.172.176 (talk) 07:29, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

This isn't "weasel-word tactic" or anything like that. Read the article. AVI doesn't support most of the features interesting nowadays. It starts with missing support for anamorphic video and ends with no support for more than one video and audio track (while supported, many implementations have problems with it), with many missing features and problems inbetween. It also cannot carry modern video codecs' data (i.e. H264) efficiently. From a technical standpoint there's nothing that speaks for AVI anymore. And all these different hacks are causing a whole lot of problems...78.54.15.246 (talk) 23:22, 8 September 2009 (UTC)

weasel words by some open source proponent? then what does that make your comment - weasel words by some microsoft hack? MP4 container is superior in all ways. Slow adoption by the unwashed masses is meaningless is not proof that it is not obsolete. Buggy whips were still popular for quite a while after cars were invented, but eventually they disappeared too. Time will tell, but if you want to bet on avi I will take that bet and give you good odds. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.50.177.2 (talk) 19:37, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Sentences which are hard (for me) to interpret

in section "Continued use"

"Ironically, while the codec/container incompatibilities mentioned in the above paragraph have undermined AVI's near-ubiquity, the obscurity and tech-savviness of those involved in the file-sharing groups has rendered this irrelevant." Can be found easier by first going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Interleave#Continued_use and then searching for the relevant quotation.

I don't understand this section. It uses language which I don't understand. I'm thinking of changing it to more simple language, when I understand it. It will probably increase very much in words for explanation. Is it a good idea? Logictheo 15:25, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

in section "Limitations"

"Since its introduction in the early 90s, new computer video techniques have been introduced which the original AVI spec any compression technique which requires access to future video frame data beyond the current frame." I feel the same about this sentence. I've read and re-read it and I don't understand what it is trying to communicate. Normally, I would try my hand at rewording it or suggesting an alternate wording, but I'm not sure what it means. Anyone have any ideas? --64.211.115.202 (talk) 15:53, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

Citation needed for XVID as choice among most of the piracy groups

I've googled a bit and found the "official scene release" standard from 2005, it's here: http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/txd2k5.nfo If you go to http://d0pe0r.1go.dk/rules/ there are even more nfos and pictures with scene rules. I don't own the site therefore I can not control for how long those documents are available and I'm not even sure if they should be mentioned as support for citation in the article.

http://www.aboutthescene.com/thescene/scenerules.html seems to be a quite reliable source. They list Xvid to be the norm since 2004. I added this citation to the article. 84.61.28.138 06:25, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Pointless Citation Request

There is a sentence in this article that begins with, "The entire structure of a RIFF file was copied from an earlier IFF format devised by Electronic Arts in the mid-1980s". Why is there a citation request for this? Anyone who knows anything about the history of the Interchange File Format knows that RIFF (and thusly AVI) is derived from it. The only thing I can conclude from this is that someone misinterpreted it and thought that AVI was invented in the 1980s, which (at least according to the rest of the article) it wasn't. Would someone please clarify why a citation is desired here? Figs (talk) 10:58, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Avi Cohen

It is named after Avi Cohen, a developer in Microsoft who came up with the format. -- Is that true? No source is given.

We have an article Avi Cohen, but that must be a different guy, a football (soccer) player.

--Austrian (talk) 18:11, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Removed by lexicon. Thanks. --Austrian (talk) 20:49, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

Redoing the "continued use" section

The section entitled "continued use" stinks of being the result of, let's say, a wikipedia disagreement. Personally, I use AVI all the time in professional application, and as such I'm sorely aware of how tough it is to get both the file format itself and the programs that use it to do certain things (such as 10-bit/channel data). That said, I do use it all the time, so my viewpoint is at least somewhat middle of the road.

Does anyone object hugely if I have a look at redoing it? I'd like to base it on a thesis of "it's not the most up-to-date but it is used a lot and generally can be made to work", which I think is a fair description.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.84.83.54 (talk • contribs) 14:18, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Nothing stops you from editing Wikipedia articles ("be bold" applies here). Just be careful to abide by the No original research rule. That is, Wikipedia articles should only say things published by reliable sources, not something the article authors figured out. (Also, please sign your posts and put new sections at the bottom.)—J. M. (talk) 18:51, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

How generally useful is this article?

It seems to me that to read and understand this article, you almost have to know the subject already. I'm not a tech person. I came here to find out about .avi files. My new digital camera takes movies in .avi format. But I have a lot of trouble opening any that are sent to me. I haven't actually tried uploading a movie from my camera to my computer. But I wonder, if I send people movies from my camera, will they be able to open them.

But I really don't know any more after reading the article than I did before. 140.147.236.194 (talk) 19:35, 26 January 2009 (UTC)Stephen Kosciesza

I think the answer to your dilemma lies in this paragraph:

"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."

In other words, when people want to watch your AVI files, their video players must not only support the AVI file format, but also the actual audio and video format. AVI is not a video format, it is just a container that holds audio and video data, packed together into a single file. The actual audio and video tracks inside the AVI file can be encoded using a variety of codecs (a codec is a piece of software that encodes/decodes the audio or video track to/from some format). So for example when you put an MPEG-4 video track into the AVI file, the video playback software must support MPEG-4 video. If it does not support MPEG-4 video, the player will not be able to play the file. And even if it supports MPEG-4 video, it could still not work because there could be an unsupported codec FourCC (which is one of the primary reasons why the AVI format is obsolete and bad—for example, in the more modern MP4 container, MPEG-4 video is marked simply as MPEG-4 video, there is no nonsensical codec FourCC that only causes needless troubles).

So, some people will be able to open your files, some will not. It depends on what software (or hardware—there are hardware players, too) they use.

Yes, I think you are right that the article could explain it more clearly. The information is there, but it may not be presented in an easily comprehensible way. But improvements are always welcome.—J. M. (talk) 20:06, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

timecode

Can we elaborate on timecodes a bit or at least provide a link to an explanation. I have edited videos and came across frames per second, fields per second and samples per second. And thanks to NTSC I came across 30 frames per 1001 ms. So already due to NTCS one has to use fractions when doing any calculations on this per second stuff. Calculations include: playback, editing.

People seem to forget what they learned in school and use floating point (base 10) for this stuff. Why? Here in wikipedia we could include some nice links to the math articles, showing that math is practical and important.

Due to this 30000/1001 fps one needs at least 16 bit integers for nominator and denominator. Due to 120000 sps audio, 16 bit is not enough. After some calculations 64 bit are probably adequate. For playback the movie can as long as the pointers reach because the in Bresenhams line drawing algorithm the nominators and denominators do not grow indefinitely. For jumps into the movie integers of infinite size may be needed (there exist classes for C++ which already provide this functionality).

When concatenating movies with different fps sps or applying slow motion to parts of a movie an absolute timecode is needed anyways. Thus this fps stuff is only needed to reduce the overhead of the container format for the typical case of long sequences of steady fps and sps. --Arnero (talk) 10:39, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Please fix "Continued use" Section!

I read and re-read the last part of the following sentence and still have no idea what it means: "More recent container formats (such as Matroska, Ogg and MP4) solve all these problems, although software is freely available to both create and correctly replay AVI files which use these more recent techniques."

Thanks! Todd (talk) 23:12, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

It simply means that there now exists encoding or transcoding software that can apply or assign all the named options to AVI that were priorily unavilable with AVI, such as support of fixed, anamorphic aspect ratios, VBR, and MPEG-4. --2003:EF:13DB:3B67:9DBA:5742:8C6A:5596 (talk) 19:24, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

need to say if it's an open format near the top please.

thanks, 70.114.248.114 (talk) 22:36, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Comparison with quicktime

Is this format still supported as uncompressed container format? Apple have something called quicktime prores which can do files over 4GB in uncompressed 10 bit per colour RGB. Can AVI 2.0 do this? Is this still useful for example for 4k uncompressed like with prores? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.27.131.165 (talk) 12:59, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Not sure about 10-bit, but AVI as a container does not limit file sizes. It's the OS and the file system (such as NTFS vs. FAT) that do that. Or rather, MacOS does limit file sizes by default, whereas Windows doesn't if you use NTFS. Also note that ProRes is a *CODEC*, not a *CONTAINER* like AVI. The container that you mean would be Quicktime, aka .mov or .mp4. You can easily store a ProRes file in an AVI container, at least up to 8-bit. --2003:EF:13DB:3B67:9DBA:5742:8C6A:5596 (talk) 19:17, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

DV AVI

Pretty much all the information found in the DV AVI section has nothing to do specifically with DV AVI at all. Type-1 and Type-2 have existed since 1992, years before the DV codec was even introduced. DV AVI simply means that you have a DV codec inside an AVI container (so that you also have DivX AVI, XviD AVI, Huffyuff AVI, Indeo AVI, h264 AVI, etc...), and type 1 and type 2 are simply two different versions of the overall AVI container. You could save videos in just about any codec inside a type 1 or type 2 AVI years before DV even existed.

The only thing that makes DV AVIs special in any way is that this format (which is simply one of many possible codecs inside an AVI container), particularly in combination with 3CCD cameras, quickly became a professional SD production and editing standard used by broadcasters after its introduction in the mid-90s, as pretty much the successor to betacam and a rival to digibeta. --2003:EF:13DB:3B67:9DBA:5742:8C6A:5596 (talk) 19:40, 11 January 2020 (UTC)

Can you provide a reference that describes AVI files as Type 1 and Type 2 but the file contains anything other than DV data? Web searches of AVI Type 1 and Type 2 always provide results that apply to files containing DV data only. Croeville (talk) 23:48, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Video Clip

Under Properties tab 'General' it is said that 'Type of file:' is 'Video Clip (.avi)'. Also, 'Type' header in Windows Explorer says 'Video Clip'; it is not intuitive at all to guess what is 'Video Clip' only by looking at this header (and that is one of the common ways to see what type some file is). 'Video Clip' is not mentioned in the article. Maybe it is some subtype of .avi. Here is the screenshot (arch., alt.). --5.43.67.141 (talk) 22:56, 9 May 2020 (UTC)