Video Transcoding - The avi Container
By George Mclovin

AVI stands for Audio Video Interleave, this is a very popular video container which has been spread all over the web by P2P and file sharing enthusiasts. AVI is a compression container originally invented by Microsoft and the developer who came up with this container is called to Avi Cohen. This video format can contain different video and audio tracks just like the DVD can however, when it comes to subtitles and format is actually short-handed, in order to address this problem many fixes and hacks have been developed but these are mostly the reason why some players will have playback compatibility issues.

When it comes to subtitles it is often recommended to use an exterior file which could be hardcoded into the video itself, this way video players won't have any problems when it comes to compatibility and handling AVI files. Back in the early 90s when the format was invented there were no playback devices which could handle this format, only computers are able to encode and read these files, almost a decade later specialized devices which are able to playback such format became available, these were basically modified CD players which were able to read the files and then project the video and audio tracks to a TV or monitor.

CD players which were able to playback the AVI container where later on modified and turned into DVD players which had the capability of reading conventional DVDs, MP3s, JPEG and AVI content. Multiformat DVD players became popular due to the fact that people were not only interested in playing DVDs on them, but he also wanted to playback their music in MP3 format or wave in addition to their online media.

This particular multimedia container has been heavily tweaked in order to allow the users to include more features in such container, the modifications were done thinking about other formats such as MKV or Matroska and MPEG-2 which is commonly known as the DVD format. DivX labs have been pioneers of the improvements done to the AVI container for the use of their special codec, DivX also came up with the DivX multimedia extension which is basically an enhanced form of the audio video interleave format, other codecs applied to it are Xvid and H.264, however this latest one has playback compatibility issues in certain standalone multimedia players.

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