The Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) is a generic meta-format for storing data in tagged chunks. It was introduced in 1991 by Microsoft and IBM, and was presented by Microsoft as the default format for Windows 3.1 multimedia files. It is based on Electronic Arts's Interchange File Format, introduced in 1985, the only difference being that multi-byte integers are in little-endian format, native to the 80x86 processor series used in IBM PCs, rather than the big-endian format native to the 68k processor series used in Amiga and Apple Macintosh computers, where IFF files were heavily used. (The specification for AIFF, the big-endian analogue of RIFF, was published by Apple Computer in 1988.) The Microsoft implementation is mostly known through file formats like AVI, ANI and WAV, which use the RIFF meta-format as their basis.
Some common RIFF file types: