Today, the variety of video formats has filled digital world. However, the AVI format still occupies a leading position. Each manufacturer decides in its own way how to play such a file on a computer. The software they offer differs in functionality, sometimes slowing down the system.

How to open video files in AVI format?

Let's look at some programs that, in our opinion, are the most successful in solving this problem. Of course, it’s impossible to cover all the programs, so we selected the most popular ones that are well-known among users and, moreover, can cope with playback on a computer or mobile device format we are considering with the greatest efficiency.

Many users are faced with a situation where the file does not play after installing the software. Standard programs Viewers either do not see the file or display a playback error because they cannot read the format and decode it. Therefore, before you start watching or opening a video, install special codecs.

A codec is a special program that encodes and decodes digital video. To open an AVI file, you need to decode it, as well as modify it.

So, the setup order will be as follows.

Players

Let's look at the most popular and practical players that will help you view the AVI format. They depend, of course, on the software available on the device.

For Windows

Playback on MacOS

For Linux

Playback in Android

On mobile devices, lighter programs are needed, but so that the image quality and AVI format do not suffer. We recommend the following.

If you have installed on your computer antivirus program Can scan all files on your computer, as well as each file individually. You can scan any file by right-clicking on the file and selecting the appropriate option to scan the file for viruses.

For example, in this figure it is highlighted file my-file.avi, then you need to right-click on this file and select the option in the file menu "scan from using AVG» . When choosing this parameter will open AVG Antivirus, which will perform the check this file for the presence of viruses.

Sometimes an error may occur as a result incorrect software installation, which may be due to a problem encountered during the installation process. This may interfere with your operating system link your AVI file to the correct application software , influencing the so-called "file extension associations".

Sometimes simple reinstallation Microsoft Windows Media Player may solve your problem by linking AVI to Microsoft correctly Windows Media Player. In other cases, problems with file associations may result from bad software programming developer and you may need to contact the developer for further assistance.

Advice: Try updating Microsoft Windows Media Player to latest version to make sure you have the latest patches and updates installed.

This may seem too obvious, but often The AVI file itself may be causing the problem. If you received the file via an attachment Email or downloaded it from a website and the download process was interrupted (for example, a power outage or other reason), the file may become damaged. If possible, try getting a new copy of the AVI file and try opening it again.

Carefully: A damaged file may cause collateral damage to a previous or existing malware on your PC, so it is very important to keep an updated antivirus running on your computer at all times.

If your AVI file related to the hardware on your computer to open the file you may need update device drivers associated with this equipment.

This problem usually associated with media file types, which depend on successfully opening the hardware inside the computer, e.g. sound card or video cards. For example, if you are trying to open an audio file but cannot open it, you may need to update sound card drivers.

Advice: If when you try to open an AVI file you receive .SYS file error message, the problem could probably be associated with damaged or outdated drivers devices that need to be updated. This process can be made easier by using driver update software such as DriverDoc.

If the steps do not solve the problem and you are still having problems opening AVI files, this may be due to lack of available system resources . Some versions of AVI files may require a significant amount of resources (e.g. memory/RAM, processing power) to properly open on your computer. This problem occurs quite often if you are using a fairly old computer. Hardware and at the same time a much newer operating system.

This problem can occur when the computer has difficulty completing a task because operating system(and other services running in background) can consume too many resources to open an AVI file. Try closing all applications on your PC before opening Audio Video Interleave File. Freeing up all available resources on your computer will provide the best conditions for attempting to open an AVI file.

If you completed all the steps described above and your AVI file still won't open, you may need to run equipment update. In most cases, even when using older versions of hardware, the processing power can still be more than sufficient for most user applications (unless you're doing a lot of CPU-intensive work, such as 3D rendering, financial/scientific modeling, or intensive multimedia work) . Thus, it is likely that your computer does not have enough memory(more commonly called "RAM", or RAM) to perform the file open task.

Microsoft Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player Playlist (WPL) is a computer file format that keeps multimedia playlists for video and audio collections. It is an owned file format used in Microsoft Windows Media Player versions 9 to 12. The fundamentals of WPL files are represented in XML format. These .WPL files can be accessed and utilized by the Nullsoft Winamp Media Player 5.6 application version as well as the Roxio Creator 2012 program. WPL files are also known as Windows Media Player playlist files, which are indicated by the Microsoft Windows Media Player or the other media players with support for WPL files as reference data when users open these playlist files and begin to access the content stored in it. The top-level aspect specifies that the file"s elements go after the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) structure. The information contained in these WPL files are directory locations to the video files and audio content chose by the creator of the .WPL file , this enables the media player application to quickly and easily find and play the video and audio content from their directory locations.

VideoLan VLC Media player

VideoLan VLC Media player is a multi-media player software that is considered to be an open source and cross platform multimedia player with framework. Thus, a product that can play most of the standard files of multimedia plus CDs, DVDs and VCDs. It also plays different streaming protocols, supported applications or devices and webcams. There is also the ability to play audios of various codecs even if there are no codec packs included: MPEG-2, WebM, MP3, WMV and MKV. This software works on most Windows computers, Mac OS X PCs, Linux and well as Unix. In addition, there is decryption for DVD which is executed via the libdvdcss library. It also has playback control support for all computers compatible with it using libcdio or libvcdinfo. On Mac computers, this media player can grab audios and videos from EyeTV applications and other devices that capture EyeTV data. On GNU and Linux, it supports encoding cards that are compatible with V4L2 and MPEG-2 which are Visiontech Kfir and Hauppage WinTV-PVR 250-350.

Quicktime Player

Quicktime Player is a multimedia player that was developed by Apple and is integrated into Mac OS X and apple iTunes. Quicktime player is compatible with windows operating systems as well, namely Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. This program is a standalone application in Windows platforms. Quicktime Player supports these video file formats: Quicktime Movie; AVI; MPEG; DV; 3GPP; and 3GPP2. Here The audio file formats supported by Quicktime Player include: iTunes audio; SD2, WAV; AMR; SND; CORE AUDIO; MP3; AU; and AIFF. Users can add some components to enable Quicktime player to support other file formats, such as Flash video, ASF, DivX Media format, OGG and Matroska. This application can be downloaded for free, but if users require comprehensive video editing features like converting files to other format, then it is recommended to upgrade their subscription to Quicktime Player Pro. This is packed with H.264 technology that consumes less storage space and bandwidth but plays high resolution videos.

Apple iTunes

Apple iTunes is a software categorized as a media player computer application for playing, downloading, organizing and saving various files, which are digital audios and videos. There is also a feature that enables content managements from iPod models, iPad Touch, iPhone, and iPad. This software can be connected to iTunes Store so a user can download or buy music, videos, audio books, ringtones or even games for iPod in just a click of a button. In fact, it allows the download of various applications via the App Store for some Apple devices, which are iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. The downside of this is that it does not enable music transfer from one device to another unit. This program is compatible for Apple's Mac OS X version 10.6.8 and other later versions, but also works for current Windows OS such as Windows 7, Windows XP and Windows Vista, then for the upcoming Windows 8.

Microsoft Zune

Zune is a digital media store developed by Microsoft. Provided are portable media players, a music subscription service known as a "Zune Music Pass", digital media player software for Windows, music and video streaming services via the Zune Software for the Xbox 360 game console. Also included are music, TV and movie sales, and media software for Windows Phones. Zune and the ZPL file format were created by Microsoft. These files have playlists of songs or videos that are saved by Zune to administer and arrange such playlists by libraries, genres or favorites. The Zune software is used to transfer multimedia files to and from various devices, such as XBox, PCs, Windows Phones and Zune Player. By default, the Zune playlist is not compatible with other media players. This means ZPL files must first be converted to M3U, PLS or WPL file formats with the use of a Zune Playlist Converter to make it work.

AVI - A audio V ideo I nterleaved, a file format introduced by Microsoft for the use of video systems in Windows environment. In this format, sectors of video data are interleaved with sectors of audio data such that the video player can support minimal data buffering.

Although the MPEG format is becoming increasingly popular (MPEG standards include MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and MPEG-7), AVI continues to be the most popular for audio/video data on the PC. In the field of video input and editing, AVI remains the de facto standard.

The AVI format became widespread after the release of Video for Windows for Windows 3.1 in November 1992. AVI is a special case of the RIFF (Resource Interchange File Format) format. RIFF universal format for the exchange of multimedia data, jointly developed by Microsoft and IBM. In fact, RIFF is an analogue of the IFF format created by Electronic Arts in 1984.

Audio and video sequences in an AVI file do not contain timestamps and do not create indexes. The data is ordered sequentially in time, according to its order in the AVI file. The application (video player) must display the video sequence frames and audio stream according to the frame rate and sampling rate, respectively, specified in the file headers.

Due to big amount limitations of the basic AVI standard, the Open Digital Media consortium has developed an extension of the AVI format - OpenDML AVI, taking into account the features required for professional video production. These extensions include support for fields (not just frames), file sizes larger than 1 GB, time code, and many other features.

Chapter 1. Theory and terminology

Video is simply a series of images recorded one after another. As you know, videos began to be recorded long before the first computer appeared, i.e. in analog form. This imposed great restrictions on its subsequent processing and editing. Up until the early 1990s, this type of video recording predominated. Later, digital video recording and storage technologies were developed. This gave a big impetus to the development of not only cinema, but also home video. Those. Recording videos and home movies has become a very popular activity. All this, against the backdrop of the development of computer technology, forced developers to improve technologies for recording, storing and processing video information. It is precisely to store such information that various video formats have been developed (on this moment There are a huge number of them and it is very difficult to navigate them).

The video format determines the structure of the video file, i.e. how the file is stored on a storage medium (CD, DVD or hard drive).

Because of large quantity video formats, many began to confuse completely different concepts - “video standard”, “video codec” and “media container”.

Codec (CODEC = COder+DECoder / codec = encoder + decoder/) - software or hardware that converts video information into a compressed data stream and vice versa.

A media container is a file format that stores information about its internal structure. The media container is actually a metaphormat , since it stores data and information about how the data will be saved directly inside the file.

You can draw some analogy between a media container and a zip archive. Those. a media container contains video and audio files inside itself, as well as a zip archive containing a JPEG image that will be compressed using a certain algorithm. A special module is usually responsible for compressing information in archives, and in media containers the role of this module is played by a codec.

Any video file has at least two characteristics that determine how to work with it. This is the type of media container and the codec(s) with which its contents are encoded.

The media container type determines the format for recording various data (video data, audio data, subtitles, service information, etc.) into a file. Knowing the type of container, a program (for example, a video player) can correctly extract data from it, synchronize audio and video data, etc.

Knowing the codec allows the program to obtain audio and video information contained in the media container from the encoded data stream.

Chapter 2. AVI Format

2.1. Understanding the AVI Compression Format

Audio Video Interleave(abbreviated AVI; letters "interleaving audio and video") is a RIFF media container first used by Microsoft in 1992 in the Video for Windows package.

The AVI file format can contain video and audio data compressed using different codec combinations, allowing video and audio to be played simultaneously. An AVI file can contain different types of compressed data (for example, DivX - video + WMA - audio or Indeo - video + PCM - audio), depending on which codec is used for encoding/decoding. Like DVDs, AVI files support multi-stream audio video. AVI files can contain different types of compressed data, such as DivX for video and MP3 for audio.

AVI files are a special case of RIFF files (short for Resource Interchange File Format). This format, originally intended for exchanging multimedia data, was developed by Microsoft together with IBM. This format is the most common form of video presentation on personal computers. Depending on the form of video data presentation, AVI files come in different standards.

AVI (Audio Video Interleaved) is the most common and least compressed of video formats. Files created using this method have the extension .avi. Video and audio data are recorded in one file on disk as follows: all information streams are divided into many equal parts ( chunks) and then written to one file one after another in turn. First the title is recorded, then the 1st part of the video and the 1st part of the audio; then the 2nd part of the video and the 2nd part of the sound, etc. In other words, the technology of alternating video frames and sound is used, which, in fact, defines the abbreviation AVI (Audio Video Interleaved). On average one second AVI-The image takes up approximately 2 MB of hard disk space.

Main characteristics:

· Type - media container

· Compatible codecs – DivX, Xvid , Indeo and others (for video) and MP3, WMA and others (for audio)

· File extension – .avi

AVI files can be played by various players, but the player must support the codec used to encode the video.

2.2. AVI color representation

In the AVI standard, not all uncompressed frames are created equal. There are different color representations of image points. Some of them are standards and are supported on all systems, others require special drivers. Most Microsoft Windows components identify a color representation by a four-character code (FOURCC), such as "RGB8" or "YUY2", others, such as DIB, do not use a four-character code for color formats.

24-bit RGB is the most well-known color representation format, supported by all major graphic programs. In 24 bits of RGB, a pixel is represented as three bytes, one byte for the red component, one byte for the green component, and one byte for the blue component.

For example:
255 0 0 (bright red pixel)

0 255 0 (bright green pixel)

0 0 255 (bright blue pixel)

0 0 0 (black pixel)

255 255 255 (white pixel)

128 128 128 (gray pixel), etc.

Other color formats:

8 bit halftone Y8

9 bit YUV9 bit

12 bit BTYUV 4:1:1

12 bit YUV2 4:2:2

8 bit YUV12 16 RGB (uses color palette)

15 bits RGB (16 bits with significant zero, 5 bits for red, 5 for green and 5 for blue)

16 bit RGB (16 bit, 5 bit for red, 6 for green and 5 for blue)

32 bit RGB (significant byte zero, 8 bits for red, 8 for green and 8 for blue)

YUV is a color representation format used in European broadcasting of the PAL television standard, which was originally introduced in England and Germany in 1967. PAL is used by most European countries and many countries around the world. The United States and Japan use the NTSC standard, France, Russia and some other countries use SECAM. Analog video systems such as NTSC, PAL and SECAM transmit color video signals as a luminance signal (Y) and two chroma signals (U and V). If R, G, and B are red, green, and blue components, then:

Y = 0.299 R + 0.587 G + 0.114 B

U = 0.493 (B - Y)

V = 0.877 (R - Y)

Color information is transmitted to the brain through three channels: the brightness channel, the blue-yellow channel and the red-green channel. For example, while we perceive blue-green hues, we will never perceive a hue that is both blue and yellow. This may be why YUV is so common. This color representation system is used by color formats such as YUV9 or YUV2.

Both BMP still images and AVI files can be saved in a variety of color formats. While 24-bit RGB is almost universally supported, there is no guarantee that software or AVI playback drivers will support lesser known formats.

3. Computer AVI video file

There are several computer video formats, the most famous of which are AVI (Microsoft) and QuickTime (Apple).

B O Most frame capture systems and non-linear editing deal with the AVI format (Audio Video Interleave - alternating audio and video). This format allows you to simultaneously store image and sound. They are recorded alternately, so that after the frame there is a recording of the audio accompaniment to it.

Today we are going to play the role of devil's advocate and conduct an investigation with bias and the use of special means in relation to the three most popular video formats - AVI, MP4 and WMV.

To begin with, it is useful to clarify the concepts regarding formats. In general terms, a video file format is a container that contains data and codecs, that is, programs for compressing and restoring information.

A container is like a suitcase for tools. Depending on the internal volume and available compartments, the tool kit may contain certain tools, in one quantity or another. That is, nothing will fit into a small and ill-conceived suitcase except a wrench and a bottle of kefir.
Codecs are information processing tools. There are codecs with a high compression ratio, but with lower quality of the output content. If codecs have less compression and higher image quality.

As you understand, different codecs can be placed in a container if this is provided for by the format of the container itself.v

An AVI container can contain many audio streams and different types codecs for video compression.
The MP4 container was specially designed for transferring streaming video via online. It also supports multiple audio channels.
The WMV container is a product of Microsoft Corporation, which always tries to create its own alternative to popular products. In many ways the properties are similar to the other two, but with a higher degree of compression.

We won’t bore you with tables with numbers, but will immediately tell you about the benchmark results in simple human words.

Comparison of three video formats by consumer properties

In general, based on the test results, it became clear that we wasted our time on these tests. Everything turned out to be approximately as could be predicted speculatively based on the theoretical descriptions of these three video formats on Wikipedia.

AVI

This format uses codecs with the lowest compression ratio. So here's what:

The most high quality image and sound output.
The highest file processing speed when converting to this format from the original uncompressed video material. This is understandable - since there is no special need for compression, rendering is faster.
Largest finished file size.

MP4

The most common video format - supported on everything that thinks in numbers. This point is useful for users who use many devices of different types on alternative platforms.

The compression ratio is higher than AVI. That's why:

Conversion takes approximately one and a half times longer.
The finished file size is approximately two times smaller.
In terms of the quality of the visuals, some sharp, not very pleasing to the eye, differences in contrast are noticeable.

WMV

Please remember that this format is proprietary to Microsoft and is primarily supported on Windows platforms. There may be incompatibilities on other operating systems.

The most high degree compression.
File size is almost half that of MP
MP4 turned out to be better in contrast, but the overall impression was worse - blurriness, less clarity of the image.
The processing time for a file in WMV is the longest among the prototypes.

Who would doubt that.

Scope of application

Let's proceed to the announcement of the verdict. Based on the evidence presented by the investigation, we can confidently state the following.

AVI

AVI quality is unlikely to be sufficient for a video projector, even if projected onto a wall in a room in an ordinary apartment.

But for a widescreen computer display, if you put the sofa on the far side of the room and arm yourself with the Barley Ear battery, then it’s quite suitable for a pleasant evening.

Note. If a romantic evening is predicted, you can cheat a little. The first part of the video program should be recorded in AVI format while the girl is still looking at the screen, and the rest of the video will also be recorded in WMV format, since no one is looking at the screen anyway :))

MP4

The optimal format for watching videos on tablet computers. For a portrait-sized screen, MP4 resolution is sufficient.

It is believed that the MP4 format is optimal in terms of quality for uploading videos to a YouTube channel.

Although, hand on heart, the quality of the video series on YouTube leaves much to be desired, if you refrain from using stronger expressions. To be honest, the quality of the videos on YouTube is absolutely lousy.

For example, on the Seria-z website, with equal traffic consumption, the quality is almost HD.

Nobody even tries to achieve the quality indicators inherent in MP4 on YouTube.

WMA

So to speak - a budget format. Great for watching videos at home on a mobile device. When you look at the screen only out of the corner of your eye while bustling around in the kitchen or covering your smartphone with your palm during college lectures.

But you can record a lot of video on a small local memory mobile gadget and a memory card.

How to play video files on MAC

You can easily play AVI, MP4 and WMA formats on MAC using Elmedia Player.

What is an avi file? How to open an .AVI file? Basic types of transformations