VLC will happily play files without any header/TOC or whatever. It has lots of heuristics in it to sniff that info from the stream when it can't find it. Try i

VLC will happily play files without any header/TOC or whatever. It has lots of heuristics in it to sniff that info from the stream when it can't find it. Try it with some broken files sometime. It really is amazing. It may not be capable of seeking properly, but it will have a damn good go at playing the file. Also - the frame index of an AVI file is at the end. It is only the headers which are at the start, and these are less important.