Resource Interchange File Format

The Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) is a generic file container format for storing data in tagged chunks. It is primarily used to store multimedia such as sound and video, though it may also be used to store any arbitrary data.

It was introduced in 1991 by Microsoft and IBM, and was presented by Microsoft as the default format for Windows 3.1 multimedia files. It is based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File Format, introduced in 1985 on the Amiga 1000, the only difference being that multi-byte integers are in little-endian format, native to the 80x86 processor series used in IBM PCs, rather than the big-endian format native to the 68k processor series used in Amiga and Apple Macintosh computers, where IFF files were heavily used.

(The specification for AIFF, the big-endian analogue of RIFF, was published by Apple Computer in 1988.)

The Microsoft implementation is mostly known through container formats like AVI, ANI and WAV, which use RIFF as their basis.

In 2010 Google introduced the WebP picture format, which uses RIFF as a container.

Read more about Resource Interchange File Format:  Explanation, Use of The INFO Chunk, RIFF Info Tags, Converting DTIM Time To Normal Time

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