WMV to AVI

Convert WMV to AVI format; WMV to AVI converting software for you.

You may want to convert WMV files on hand to AVI files since it will become more convenient and easier for editing. Before trying the software below, you may want to know formats WMV and AVI's origins.

WMV stands for Windows Media video -- developed and controlled by Microsoft. WMV is a generic name of Microsoft's video encoding solutions and does not necessarily define the technology what it uses -- since version 7 (WMV) Microsoft has used its own flavor of MPEG-4 video encoding technology (not very surprising, it's not compatible with other MPEG-4 technologies.). DivX ;-) video format is originally based on hacked WMV codec. The only difference between ASF files and WMV or WMA files are the file extensions and the MIME types. The MIME type for a WMV file is video/x-ms-wmv, and for WMA it is audio/x-ms-wma. The MIME type for ASF is video/x-ms-asf. The basic internal structure of the files is identical.

The change in extensions was made to make it easier for an application to identify the content of a media file. A .wma file extension designates a file containing only audio. A .wmv extension designates a file containing both video and audio. Microsoft, seeking to become a vital player in the budding world of digital media, a host of software products intended to ensure its influence over music and video. Digital media such as MP3 music files or streams of video sent over the internet must be created, edited, encrypted, encoded, indexed and distributed, and Microsoft has software involved in all these tasks.

One key part of that plan is Microsoft's Windows Media Video (WMV) format, a new way to encode video that has been under development for years and is reaching completion. Freezing the format will make it possible to encode and decode files without having to worry about whether the file will be out of date in a few months. That could reduce the reluctance of business partners to target their products to the WMV format.

The abbreviation AVI stands for "Audio Video Interlaced". This video format was created by Microsoft, which was introduced along with Windows 3.1. AVI, the proprietary format of Microsoft's "Video for Windows" application, merely provides a framework for various compression algorithms such as Cinepak, Intel Indeo, Microsoft Video 1, Clear Video or IVI.

AVI is a file format, like MP3 or JPG. But unlike these formats, AVI is a container format, meaning it can contain video audio compressed using many different combinations of codecs. So while MP3 and JPG can only contain a certain kind of compression (MPEG Audio Layer 3 and JPEG), AVI can contain many different kinds of compression (e.g. DivX video + WMA audio or Indeo video + PCM audio), as long as a codec is available for encoding/decoding. AVI all look the same on the "outside", but on the "inside", they may be completely different. There is no such thing as a "normal" thing, and is probably the most common video format around (although its popularity wavered a few years ago, but has since come back with a vengeance due to the emergence of DivX).