Info about Audio Video
All about audio video
In November 1992, Microsoft introduced a multimedia container format, called AVI, which was an acronym for the actual name, Audio Video Interleave. This format was especially made for the Video for Windows technology. What made AVI very useful was the fact that it contained audio and video data that could be simultaneously playbacked thanks to the fact that they were both in a certain file container which allowed it
Right after their release, the AVI files weren’t used so often as today and didn’t start to gain popularity until the early 2000s. After that, the AVI, due to its simple use and thanks to the internet, became the most commonly used audio-video playback format. There are some compression schemes like Xvid, MPEG4 or Dvix and others, and the AVI file is able to carry audio/video data inside of them. In order to be used on Mac, an AVI, which usually contains a Divx or a WMV, needs a quicktime component.
The MP4 format was the AVI succeedent and also more technologically evolved, and most of the video broadcasted on the Internet used it, but that didn’t mean that AVI wouldn’t still be used, thanks to its popularity and distribution all over the internet. Also, because of the very low compression rate, AVI files can be of better quality than the others competitors, like MPEG4 or MKV, even if it doesn’t have so many features. Because it’s so simplistic, it is much easier to find software for the Audio Video Interleave.
AVI is very useful when you want to share or update media files, and it’s very easy to use. But if you want to compress it, you should know that its size is bigger than an MPEG4s’, so you may want to use the latter in this case. Even though AVI can be easily playbacked on almost any media player, you will still need certain codecs and updates in order for them to work properly. Even if AVI wasn’t meant to use modern compression techniques like for example MPEG4, there still exist approaches that can support it.
As a conclusion, AVI files are very popular container formats and people used it in the past and will most likely use it in the future too, because of its easy use and high quality. Thanks to other container formats developed later, such as MP4, Matroska or Ogg, the AVI files could be finally created and replayed correctly and also use more modern technology.