Avi is a popular author of books for children and teens. His books span audiences from young children to teens and genres from humour to historical fiction to mystery.

Several of his books have won awards. The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle and Nothing but the Truth were both Newbery Honor Books, and both these books and Poppy have won Boston Horn-Globe Book Awards.

He is secretive about what his birth name was and goes exclusively by Avi, a nickname conferred on him by his twin sister Emily early on in life. He was born in 1937 in New York to a family to whom reading and writing were very important. He has a learning disability (dysgraphia) that caused him to struggle with both things in school, but when he finally overcame some of his difficulties with the help of tutoring, he discovered a talent for writing. He started writing plays for adults, and then when he had children began writing the children's books he is famous for. He remains an outspoken friend of learning-disabled children.

He has an official website at www.avi-writer.com.

His books:

-Midnight Magic
-Emily Upham's Revenge
-History of Helpless Harry
-Punch With Judy
-Romeo & Juliet, Together and Alive at Last
-S.O.R. Losers
-Who Was that Masked Man Anyway?
-The Man who was Poe
-No More Magic
-Who Stole The Wizard Of Oz?
-Wolf Rider
-Poppy
-Poppy & Rye
-Ragweed
-Ereth's Birthday
-Man From The Sky
-Smuggler's Island
-Windcatcher
-The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
-City of Light/City of Dark
-The Barn
-Beyond the Western Sea
-Captain Grey
-The Fighting Ground
-Night Journeys
-Encounter At Easton
-Finding Providence
-Bright Shadow
-The Christmas Rat
-Perloo the Bold
-Tom, Babbette & Simon
-Keep Your Eyes on Amanda
-Amanda Joins the Circus
-Devils Race
-Something Upstairs
-Blue Heron
-Nothing but the truth
-A Place Called Ugly
-Sometimes I Think I Hear My Name
-What Do Fish Have To Do With Anything?
-Abigail Takes the Wheel

Audio Video Interleave. A simplistic Resource Interchange File Format based, media container format defined by Microsoft and used as the native file format of its Video for Windows software since the early 1990s.

Synchronization between the audio and the video can often be poor as standard AVIs include no real timing method. The format does allow optionally interleaving the video and audio streams, which can help synchronization problems.

Since AVI is only a container format the actual codec used for compression of the video and audio can vary, but Indeo, Cinepak, and RLE are common for video. For audio PCM is common.

AVI was eventually extended with features for professional video production by the Open Digital Media Consortium. Their changes include removal of a 2 gibibyte file size limit, and adding timecodes for dependable audio to video synchronization. Microsoft has supported these extensions in their Video for Windows, and Windows Media Player software.

There is one interesting feature inherent in AVIs which has interesting effects for internet file sharing: the (optional) index that lets a video player seek to random points quickly is located at the very end of the file. This means that any incomplete download will take significantly longer to seek within.

In 1998 Microsoft released the ASF (originally Active, now Advanced Streaming Format) specification codeveloped with Real Networks. This was intended as the successor to AVI, however the AVI format is still being used as a container for newer codecs, including the very popular DivX, OpenDivX, XviD family of encoders.


http://www.opennet.ru/docs/formats/avi.txt http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/directx9_c/directx/htm/avirifffilereference.asp http://www.jmcgowan.com/avitech.html#OpenDML

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