An AVI movie can be compressed using different video codecs. This compression is necessary in order to reduce the movie file size which otherwise would occupy too much space and copying it or transferring it from one device to another would be a complicated step to achieve.

If you wish to watch your AVI movie in your PC and this movie was compressed with a particular codec, you will need to have the same codec installed on that PC. You will always need one same codec to compress and to decompress not only an AVI movie but any other movie n any other format as well.

There are some codecs which you can use with your AVI movie when you wish that it doesn't loose as much quality as it generally would through the compression- decompression process. TSCC is one of the codecs which would allow you to compress, transfer and decompress your movie without loosing its quality.

One of the main advantages of AVI files is the fact that they can be played in many different players while other files can only be played in specific ones. If you storage or distribute your own movie through an AVI file, it could be seen in Real Player, Camtasia Player, Media Player and QuickTime.

Another important aspect to take into account regarding AVI files is that the audio data occupies much more space than the video one. This way, it is very important that your movie's audio data is carefully compressed as well as the video data is, or otherwise it could occupy much more space than you would have thought.

If you do not know which audio codec to choose for your audio AVI file, MPEG Layer 3 is one of the most advisable ones. This codec would allow you to compress your audio file converting it into a much smaller file and without loosing much of its quality, although it will not be exactly the same than it was before being compressed. There also are other good codecs, but due to these files high size, all of them would cause your movie to loose some of its audio quality.