Resource Interchange File Format: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 18:02, 18 January 2005

Revision as of 00:48, 23 January 2005

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The '''Resource Interchange File Format''' ('''RIFF''') is a generic meta-format for storing data in tagged chunks. It was introduced in [[1991]] by [[Microsoft]] and [[International Business Machines|IBM]]. It is a clone of [[Electronic Arts]]'s [[Interchange File Format]], introducted in [[1985]], the only difference being that multi-byte integers are in [[endianness|little-endian]] format, native to the [[80x86]] processor series used in IBM PCs, rather than the big-endian format native to the [[680x068k]] processor series used in [[Amiga]] and [[Apple Macintosh]] computers, where IFF files were heavily used.

The Microsoft implementation is mostly known through file formats like [[AVI]] and [[WAV]], which both use the RIFF meta-format as their basis.