Resource Interchange File Format
| Initial release | August 1991 |
|---|---|
| Type of format | Container |
| Extended from | Interchange File Format |
| Extended to | AVI, ANI, PAL, RDIB, RMIDI, RMMP, WAV |
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.
The Microsoft implementation is mostly known through container formats like AVI, ANI and WAV, which use RIFF as their basis.
RIFF 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 Commodore Amiga, 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.
In 2010 Google introduced the WebP picture format, which uses RIFF as a container.
RIFF files consist entirely of "chunks". The overall format is identical to IFF, except for the endianness as previously stated, and the different meaning of the chunk names.
All chunks have the following format:
Two chunk identifiers, "RIFF" and "LIST", introduce a chunk that can contain subchunks. The RIFF and LIST chunk data (appearing after the identifier and length) have the following format:
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