Initializing... drag & drop files here
Supports: XVID
.avi file, so the converter accepts those too — drop in several at once and each one converts in parallel.XVID (correctly spelled Xvid) is not a container at all — it's a codec. Xvid is an open-source implementation of the MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile standard, maintained by volunteer developers and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It started in 2001 as a fork of OpenDivX after DivX Networks stopped publishing their open-source code, which is why people still describe Xvid as "the free DivX": both are MPEG-4 ASP codecs and both can usually read each other's files. The compressed video almost always lives inside an .avi (Audio Video Interleave) container, which is the file you actually downloaded or ripped years ago.
That legacy is exactly the problem. Xvid was excellent at squeezing a full-length movie onto a CD in the early 2000s, but it predates H.264 and the hardware-decode era. The reasons people convert away from it today:
<video> format. Converting to MP4 (H.264) or WebM (VP9/AV1) is required before footage can stream in a browser.| Format | Standard / Origin | Native playback today | Typical codecs | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Xvid in AVI | Xvid codec (MPEG-4 ASP, 2001, GPL) in AVI container (Microsoft, 1992) | VLC, MPC-HC; not most phones/browsers/TVs | Xvid / DivX video, MP3 / AC-3 audio | Legacy archives, older Windows playback |
| MP4 (H.264) | ISO/IEC 14496-14 (2003) | Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, all modern browsers, TVs, consoles | H.264 / H.265, AAC | Universal playback, sharing, streaming |
| MOV | Apple QuickTime File Format (1991) | macOS, iOS, QuickTime, VLC | H.264, HEVC, ProRes, AAC | Final Cut Pro and Mac editing |
| MKV | Matroska (open, 2002) | VLC, MPV, modern Android players; not Safari / Roku | H.264, H.265, AV1, multi-track | Media servers, multi-subtitle libraries |
| WebM | Google / WHATWG (2010, royalty-free) | Chrome, Firefox, Edge; Safari 17+ for AV1 | VP9, AV1, Opus | HTML5 web embeds, background video |
VLC Media Player and MPC-HC play Xvid-in-AVI out of the box on Windows, macOS, and Linux, because they bundle their own decoders. The trouble starts with default players: Windows Media Player, QuickTime, the iOS and Android built-in players, and browser <video> tags generally do not decode Xvid without an extra codec pack. That's why converting to MP4 (H.264) is the reliable fix — instead of installing software on every device, you change the file once so it plays natively everywhere.
Re-encoding Xvid (MPEG-4 ASP) to H.264 is a true re-encode, not a remux, so it is technically lossy — but with a high-quality preset the loss is not visible in side-by-side viewing. In our testing, an old 700 MB Xvid AVI re-encoded to H.264 MP4 at the "Very High" preset came out visually indistinguishable from the source and slightly smaller, because H.264 is about 40% more efficient than Xvid at equal quality. If you want to avoid any new generational loss, the only fully lossless option is to re-wrap the Xvid stream into another AVI or MKV with XVID to MKV, which copies the video bytes unchanged.
Both are MPEG-4 Part 2 (ASP) codecs, so a player that handles one almost always handles the other, and their files are largely interchangeable. The difference is licensing and origin: DivX is a commercial product from DivX, Inc., while Xvid is open-source software released under the GPL — it began in 2001 as a community fork of the open-source OpenDivX code. In practice they compress to similar quality and size; the "free DivX" nickname for Xvid captures the relationship accurately.
This usually means the device decoded one stream but not the other. Many phones can play the MP3 audio inside an AVI but have no Xvid video decoder (you hear sound, see a black screen), or vice-versa. Rather than chase a codec pack, convert the file to MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio — both are decoded in hardware on essentially every modern phone, so the picture and sound come back together.
Only if you specifically need the smaller files and know the target supports them. H.264 is the safest choice because it plays on every device made since roughly 2010. H.265 (HEVC) and AV1 compress 40-50% smaller but have narrower hardware support — HEVC needs Safari 11+/recent Android, and AV1 decode needs Chrome 70+, Firefox 67+, or Safari 17+ and fairly recent GPUs. For a file you just want to play and share, stick with XVID to MP4; reserve H.265/AV1 for archives where storage savings matter more than universal playback.
Yes. Pick MP3 as the output format and the converter drops the Xvid video track and encodes the audio stream to MP3 — handy for pulling a song or a lecture's audio out of an old clip. The dedicated XVID to MP3 page walks through bitrate selection if you want to control the output size.
Yes. Files are uploaded over an encrypted (TLS) connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — there's no sign-up, no watermark, and your files are never shared or made public. The practical limit on a very large AVI is upload time over your connection, not any per-file cap; for multi-gigabyte archives, expect the upload itself to take the most time.