Now, about AVI file sizes.
LIMITATIONS:
First, when creating any type of file, one should be aware that there is a limitation in Windows95/98 of 2 gigabytes (GB) that limits files (regardless of file type) to the same maximum file size as the FAT16 file system, which is 2 GB minus 1 byte (FAT16 on NT limit is 4 gigabytes).
Therefore, on computers using the FAT32 file system, the
maximum file size is 4 GB minus 2 bytes. To create larger than 4GB files load NTFS on your NT machine. The file size limitation is hundreds of GB. (232 clusters so file size depends on cluster size setup on disk.)
Here are the limits for FAT16: file 2 gigabytes, partition 2 gigabytes
FAT16 (NT): file 4 gigabytes, partition 4 gigabytes
FAT32: file 4 gigabytes, partition 2 terrabytes
NTFS: file 2 terrabytes, partition 16 exabytes (18.4 x 10^18 bytes)
Hardware limits:
IDE drive size limit: 540 megabytes
EIDE drive size limit: 136.9 gigabytes
BIOS boot partition size limit: 7.8 GB
It should also be noted that:
1. FAT16 partition larger than 2 gigabytes under NT is not visible to MS-DOS
2. NTFS file size limit is actually 2^32 clusters. Current industry standard hard disk sector size is 512 bytes, giving a 2 terrabyte file size limit.
AVI FILE SIZES AND THE 2 GB LIMIT:
With respect to AVI files, the OpenDML committee has developed a spec for AVI 2.0 files. This includes unlimited file size, interleaved indexes, and support for field indexes in addition to frame indexes. The AVI 2.0 spec was also designed to be backwards compatible. So many applications which do not support AVI 2.0 should still be able to play
back the first 1 GB of the file. Beyond 1 GB, additional data is
appended with a FourCC chunk code of 'AVIX'. To check if an AVI file is 2.0, run the riffwalk utility provided in the DirectShow SDK and check
for a 'odml' format tag. If it exists, the file is AVI 2.0 format.
AVI 2.0 is not supported by VFW (Video For Windows), which creates an AVI file in the 1.0 format. The AVI 1.0 format does not support unlimited file sizes and limits one to a 4 GB file size (theoretically).
However, due to a bug in the MS api used to create AVI files, the index and a couple other entries are corrupt if you create a file larger than 2 GB. Also, some older players will only play back a 1 gig file. So the
following guidelines apply: