AVB can mean several different things depending on where it appears, which is why confusion is common; when you’re dealing with an .AVB file extension, it usually refers to an Avid Bin from Avid Media Composer that stores organizational metadata like clips, subclips, sequences, and markers while the actual audio/video lives separately in places such as `Avid MediaFiles\MXF`, and because it’s an Avid-specific format, you open it only inside Avid, with offline media typically pointing to path issues rather than bin corruption, whereas outside Avid, “AVB” can also mean unrelated networking or Android-security terms that don’t function as openable files.

In professional audio/video and some car Ethernet networks, AVB is shorthand for Audio Video Bridging, an IEEE technology giving real-time media streams timing accuracy and reserved bandwidth—very much a networking concept, not a file; in Android contexts, AVB typically means Android Verified Boot, checking system partitions with tools tied to `vbmeta`, and in a few outdated cases the `.avb` extension might belong to Microsoft Comic Chat Character files if unrelated to Avid.

How to open an AVB file is determined by what the AVB actually is, but in the usual Avid Bin (.avb) scenario, you open it only through Avid Media Composer by loading the project and then opening the bin, which shows your clips and sequences; Media Offline errors typically point to missing or displaced `Avid MediaFiles\MXF` rather than a bad bin, so reconnecting or relinking fixes it, and if the bin is unreadable, Avid Attic provides automatic backups you can restore.

If your “AVB” is the networking term Audio Video Bridging, there won’t be a readable document, since AVB is about synchronization and bandwidth on Ethernet, handled through hardware/software configuration; if it’s Android Verified Boot, you work with firmware data like `vbmeta` using developer utilities instead of a viewer, and if it happens to be a legacy Microsoft Comic Chat Character file, only the original software or a retro-compatible environment can load it.

An Avid Bin (`.avb`) is solely a metadata repository, holding details about clips, sequences, timecode ranges, and markers, with the heavy lifting done by MXF media stored elsewhere such as in `Avid MediaFiles\MXF\…`; copying only the `.avb` moves the edit schema but not the actual video/audio, so Avid will open the bin but show Media Offline until the proper media is available or relinked, and this division keeps bins lightweight and share-ready—so an `.avb` by itself cannot “play” without its media or another exported file.