How to Convert MP4 to AVI for Older DVD Players and Devices

Most of the internet is obsessed with converting things to MP4. But what about when you need to go the other direction?

It sounds backwards, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons you might need an AVI file in 2025. Your car’s built-in media player only reads AVI. Your old DVD player chokes on MP4. Your video editing software from 2015 only imports AVI. Or you’re working with industrial equipment that has very specific format requirements and nobody is going to update the firmware.

Whatever the reason, you need to turn that .mp4 into an .avi, and most online tools only advertise the reverse.

Why this conversion is harder to find

Every converter website leads with “AVI to MP4” because that’s the popular direction. Going from MP4 back to AVI is treated like a weird edge case. Some tools bury the option. Others don’t support it at all. And the ones that do usually have a 100MB file limit, which is useless for a full-length movie or a long recording.

The upload headache (again)

Even for tools that support MP4 to AVI, you run into the same old problem: uploading a large video file to someone else’s server takes forever. MP4 files are already compressed, so they’re usually smaller than AVI, but a 45-minute presentation recording can still easily hit 1GB. Nobody wants to sit through a 30-minute upload for a format conversion.

Convert MP4 to AVI directly in your browser

The GetAnyFile Video Converter handles both directions. MP4 to AVI, AVI to MP4, it doesn’t care. The conversion runs entirely on your machine using WebAssembly, so there’s no upload and no file size cap.

Steps:

1. Open the MP4 to AVI Converter.
2. Drop your .mp4 file onto the page.
3. Make sure the output is set to AVI.
4. Click Convert.
5. Download your AVI file when the progress bar finishes.

The output AVI file uses standard codecs that older devices and software actually recognize. No codec Pack installations, no driver hunting, just a clean AVI file that works.

A word about file sizes

One thing to keep in mind: AVI files are almost always larger than MP4 files. AVI uses less efficient compression, which is actually the reason older devices can read it, they don’t need much processing power to decode it.

So if your 500MB MP4 becomes a 1.2GB AVI, that’s completely normal. You’re not losing quality, you’re just storing the same video in a less compressed container. Make sure your target device has enough storage.

If your DVD player or car system needs AVI, now you know exactly where to get it done.