Since its introduction in the early 90s, new computer video techniques have been introduced which the original AVI specification did not anticipate.
AVI does not provide a standardised way to encode aspect ratio information, with the result that players cannot select the right one automatically (though it may be possible to do so manually).[2]
There are several competing approaches to including timecode in AVI files, which affects usability of the format in film and television postproduction (although it is widely used). An equivalent of the Broadcast Wave extensions, designed to standardise postproduction metadata for wave audio files, has not emerged.
AVI is not intended to contain variable frame rate material. Workarounds for this limitation increase overhead dramatically.
AVI was not intended to contain video using any compression technique which requires access to future video frame data beyond the current frame. Approaches exist to support modern video compression techniques (e.g. MPEG-4) which rely on this functionality, although this is beyond the intent of the original specification and may cause problems with playback software which does not anticipate this use.
AVI cannot contain some specific types of VBR data (such as MP3 audio at sample rates below 32KHz) reliably.
Overhead for AVI files at the resolutions and frame rates normally used to encode feature films is about 5 MB per hour of video, the significance of which varies with the application.
More recent container formats (such as Matroska, Ogg and MP4) solve all these problems, although software is freely available to both create and correctly replay AVI files which use these more recent techniques.