In fact, whether the DVD players play AVI videos or not, it depends on the DVD player model, the AVI video codec or the AVI video resolution/size: 1  Most DVD players only accept MPEG-2 in standard VOBs. 2  Though some newer DVD players can play AVI files, it only plays AVI which is encoded with DivX. However, AVI is a container video format which may encoded with different video codecs like DivX, Xvid, MPEG-4, H.263, WMV, MPEG-1 and etc.