[FFmpeg-user] Compressed AVI to useable format

[Ferdi Scholten]

On 11-04-2022 21:48, Zach Beal wrote:
> Hello,
>
>                  I have compressed AVI files that I want to convert to an uncompressed format. I do not know what the files are compressed with because they are exported from data acquisition software as "compressed AVI". How can this be accomplished with FFmpeg?
>
>
I don't think you want uncompressed format. The avi container can have a 
lot of different compressed audiovideo formats. There is however no 
clear specification of codecs for avi containers as it is a fairly old 
one, avi was superseded by asf. both formats were developed by Microsoft.

Try to use ffprobe to find out which codecs are used in the avi 
container. Most likely it will be something like 
divx/xvid/realvideo/cinepack as those were the usual suspects in the avi 
days.

Most flexible modern container is matroska (mkv). It can most likely 
handle those old codecs. Converting them to newer codecs will only 
degrade the quality that probably is not very good to begin with.