Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news
From: gil@snsys.com (Gil Jaysmith)
Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.programming.gnu_compiler
Subject: Re: Memory allocation probs...
Date: Tue, 04 Nov 1997 16:23:40 GMT
Organization: SN Systems
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"Graeme Evans" <evans@fourny.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>I think RIFF is a microsoft format. WAV files are a sort of RIFF, I'm sure
>theres an explanation of the format somewhere in the windows multimedia
>manuals. Not that it would help you much except tell you where to look in
>the header to find the format of the data inside the RIFF, which could I
>guess be anything

Gil cheerfully boots up MSDEV and there you are:

Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF)
A tagged-file specification used to define standard formats for
multimedia files. Tagged-file structure helps prevent compatibility
problems that often occur when file-format definitions change over
time. Because each piece of data in the file is identified by a
standard header, an application that does not recognize a given data
element can skip over the unknown information. See also tagged file
format.

The exact contents are subject to interpretation by the specific file
player thanks to this headered-block system; the examples given are
WAVE (samples), RMID (MIDI), and RDIB (bitmaps). I expect there's a
movie format in there somewhere too.

- Gil