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An AVI file is just a container. Inside of it are multiple streams, each requiring their own codec to make sense of. For example, your AVI file could have an 8-bit h264 video stream and a MPEG layer 3 audio stream.

I hope you kept the original file! There are tools out there to show you what streams are in an AVI file (can't link without knowing your OS), so use one of these to figure out how the original file was encoded. Then (hopefully) you just need to encode your material in those formats and load it up (assuming it fits).