AVI to NIST Converter

AVI is a multimedia container that is very popular among PC and Mac users. The format was developed by Microsoft in 1992. Usually AVI is used as a video format but unlike other formats of that time, AVI may contain both audio and video data compressed with a use of different combinations of codecs. More often such video codecs as DivX and XVID are used with .avi files. For audio playback such codecs as MP3, AC3 and PCM are used. It is possible to play AVI files with Windows Media Player or other similar programs.

SPHERE (SPeech HEader Resources) is a file format defined by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and is used with speech audio. SoX can read these files when they contain μ-law and PCM data. It will ignore any header information that says the data is compressed using shorten compression and will treat the data as either μ-law or PCM. This will allow SoX and the command line shorten program to be run together using pipes to encompasses the data and then pass the result to SoX for processing.