What is a AVI file?
Classic Windows video format with broad compatibility
The .AVI file (also known as an Audio Video Interleave file) is a very popular video format with both audio and video usually stored in an uncompressed format. The AVI video file was first developed by Microsoft in 1992 and for a long time was the standard video format for Windows machines. AVI files are a multimedia container format that stores audio and video using a variety of codecs; popular codecs with high compression ratios were DivX and XviD.
AVI files can be compressed, but typically they use less compression and are larger than many other popular video formats like MOV and MPEG. AVI files can be created without any compression and results in a “lossless AVI file.” These lossless AVI files have really large filesizes (can range between 2-3GB per minute of video). However, a lossless AVI file will not lose quality overtime and allows for playback without requiring any codecs to be installed on the user’s computer.
