Resource Interchange File Format

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

Data structure

A reef - 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 to multiple lists and chunks in principle, any order - made ​​for specific file types restrictions.

Lists can in turn 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 only eight bytes in size: a FourCC as type and size of the data.

All of said size information does not contain the (first) eight bytes of the respective header and may not necessary to align a zero byte chunks subsequent to the word boundary. They are of data type Integer with Intel byte order. The RIFF variant RIFX used as IFF ( AIFF ) to Motorola format.