Interchange File Format

Interchange File Format
Internet media type	application/x-iff
Developed by	Electronic Arts, Commodore/Amiga
Initial release	1985 (1985)
Type of format	Digital container format

Interchange File Format (IFF), is a generic container file format originally introduced by the Electronic Arts company in 1985 (in cooperation with Commodore/Amiga) in order to facilitate transfer of data between software produced by different companies.

IFF files do not have any standard extension. On many systems that generate IFF files, file extensions are not important (the OS stores file format metadata separately from the file name). An .iff extension is commonly used for ILBM format files, which use the IFF container format.

Resource Interchange File Format is a format developed by Microsoft and IBM in 1991 that is based on IFF, except the byte order has been changed to little-endian to match the x86 processor architecture. Apple's AIFF is a big-endian audio file format developed from IFF. The TIFF image file format is unrelated.

See also

• RIFF (a little-endian incompatible derivative of IFF, originally from Microsoft)
• AIFF (a big-endian compatible derivative of IFF, originally from Apple)
• Type-length-value (TLV) representation.
• IFF-ILBM (a very popular IFF-based image file format)
• PNG (a modern graphics file format with a chunk structure inspired by IFF)
• FourCC (the chunk identification approach used by many TLV formats, including IFF, as verbose Magic number)

External links

• “EA IFF 85”: Standard for Interchange Format Files - the original IFF spec written by EA's Jerry Morrison (January 14, 1985)
• Standards and specs: The Interchange File Format (IFF) - article at IBM developerworks page.
• Page about Amiga files formats and IFF variants
• IFF Chunk Registry
• IFF standard - plus source code and a listing of registered chunks and FORMs in the AmigaOS context.