[6] In 2010 the US government's National Archives and Records Administration defined AVI as the official wrapper for preserving digital video.
[8] Microsoft recognized the problem and sought to develop a standard that would losslessly compress the video files.
The first chunk is identified by the "hdrl" tag, which stores the information required by the codec to decompress the AVI file for viewing.
The second sub-chunk is identified by the "movi" tag, containing the actual audio and visual data that make up the AVI video.
[11] By way of the RIFF format, the audio and visual data contained in the "movi" chunk can be encoded or decoded by software called a codec, which is an abbreviation for (en)coder/decoder.
An AVI file may carry audio and visual data inside the chunks in virtually any compression scheme, including Full Frame (Uncompressed), Indeo, run-length encoding, and Microsoft Video 1.
More recent container formats (such as Matroska, Ogg and MP4) solve all these problems, although software is freely available to both create and correctly replay AVI files which use the techniques described here.
In the late 1990s through early 2000s, most professional-level DV software, including non-linear editing programs, only supported Type 1.