How Does Avi Work?


When you buy a DVD player software, you have to consider what formats it support and how utility they are. Since the product you buy is working for you to enjoy a leisure time, a full-featured product would be your best choice. Usually the common video formats are AVI, AMV, ASX, DIVX, MOV, MP4, MPG, WMV, and RM. As to the audio formats, they are MP3, DCT, AMR, RAW, WAV AND WMA. Here let’s see how the AVI format works. What specialty it own and what demerits it has. The initial words AVI is a abbreviation of Audio Video Interleave. From the long name, you may know that it is a multimedia container format and it allows synchronous audio-with video playback. It can be a big leap forward in technology compared with the days we only can “watch” movies without sound. It came out in 1992 by Microsoft for its Windows technology. It is a derivation of the RIFF which divides a file’s data into chunks. An AVI file usually take a single chunk in a RIFF formatted file. In normal condition, AVI file has three sub-chunks.

The first one is “hdrl” tag containing meta-data about the video. The second sub-chunk is identified by the “movi” tag which includes the actual audio and visual data that make up the AVI movie. And the third optional one is identified by the “idx1” tag which indexes the offset of the data chunks within the file. All these will help us to know how the AVI format works. However, it has some limitations. Since it did not anticipate the new computer video techniques in early 1990s, it has no standardized way to encode aspect ratio information. Therefore, this format will not be able to select the right aspect ratio automatically for players. And the good news is that it can be adjusted manually. And the second disadvantage is that the usability of the format in film and television post-production can be affected by the several competing approaches including a time code in AVI files. And still no equivalent for AVI files like Broadcast Wave extension is created now. What’s more, there is no compression technology which requires access to future video frame data beyond the temporal frame. As a result, it is much larger than other formats of the same content. Pursuing a less and less space, this characteristic obviously does not keep pace with times.

Thankfully, you can use some great DVD player software for PC to help you to convert the formats. After converting, you can play AVI files on a PPC, on an N95, and in iTunes. And it is not a tough thing. Since windows media player supports a wide extensive format types, you can install a third-party software to help you to convert the AVI files into WMV video files which can be run on windows media player. By doing these, the pocket PCs can run since it is a scaled-down version of windows media player for desktop computer. Although iTunes can read diverse types of video formats, the one it cannot read is the AVI file extension. Certainly, if you want to play AVI files in iTunes, you have to find a suitable software to turn it. By the way, the products installing Windows and Mac operating system can efficiently process conversions of this. For example, the HandBrake and QuickTime can solve that problem. Remember to connect your computer to a power source because conversions will quickly drain your battery. All right, the last point I have to stressed is that you’d better buy the windows 8 DVD player software since it can run on Windows 8 system.