Resource Interchange File Format

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Resource Interchange File Format ( RIFF ) is a container format for storing multimedia data , which was developed by Microsoft and IBM in 1991 and introduced with the multimedia extensions for Windows 3.1 . The Interchange File Format (IFF) served as the basis for the RIFF file format . RIFF files can contain multiple multimedia resources, such as: B. Windows bitmap , audio and video data, MIDI tracks or RTF texts .

Data structure

A Riff file consists of the RIFF header and content. The header consists of three times four bytes: the FourCC 'RIFF', the file size and a FourCC for the file type, usually 'WAVE' or 'AVI' . The content consists of zero or more lists and chunks in basically any order - there are restrictions for specific file types.

Lists themselves can contain lists and chunks, while chunks are elementary. A list header consists of the FourCC 'LIST', the size and a FourCC for the list type, while the header of chunks is only eight bytes in size: a FourCC as the type and the size of the data.

None of the size specifications mentioned contain the (first) eight bytes of the respective header and also not the possibly necessary zero byte to align a subsequent chunk with the word boundary. They are of the integer data type with little endian order . The RIFF variant RIFX uses the Motorola format like IFF (and AIFF ).

Web links