Audio Video Interleaved (AVI) is s a proprietary multimedia container format developed by Microsoft and IBM. The AVI wrapper is particularly poor at handling timecode, and has some other limitations; since its introduction in the 90’s new computer techniques have been introduced to which the original AVI specification did not anticipate. Therefore it is – in essence – not suitable as preservation format. Hovewer, it is a very popular format. 

The FFmpeg tool can help you to convert almost any audio and video file from the command line. It is free to use, and is available for Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems. However, before depositing audiovisual material in the DANS Archive, please always contact DANS for discussion on the available formats/containers and possible migrations.

Because it has limitations, AVI is a DANS non-preferred container format for video.