AVB may indicate different things in different contexts, and the .AVB extension most commonly corresponds to an Avid Bin used in Avid Media Composer to store project metadata including clips, subclips, sequences, and markers, with the actual media housed outside the bin in locations like `Avid MediaFiles\MXF`; bins must be opened within Avid, and if media appears offline it usually signals relinking issues, while non-Avid uses of "AVB" in networking or Android security don’t refer to openable files at all.

In pro A/V and certain automotive Ethernet environments, AVB refers to Audio Video Bridging, an IEEE framework ensuring synchronized, bandwidth-reserved media over Ethernet rather than defining a file format; in Android firmware work, AVB instead means Android Verified Boot, which validates partitions during startup using elements like `vbmeta`, and older software may also assign `.avb` to Microsoft Comic Chat Character files when not tied to Avid.

How you open an AVB file is determined by the specific AVB format you’re dealing with, but if it’s the common Avid Bin (.avb), you don’t open it with a normal app—you load it inside Avid Media Composer by opening the project and then opening the bin, where clips and sequences appear as Avid items; if everything opens but says Media Offline, the bin is usually fine and you just need to reconnect `Avid MediaFiles\MXF` using Relink or database rebuilds, and if the bin seems damaged, restoring a recent backup from Avid Attic is often the quickest fix.

If your "AVB" is the networking term Audio Video Bridging, there isn’t an openable AVB file, 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`) does not store actual audio/video, because it’s meant purely as metadata describing what clips exist, how sequences are arranged, which timecode portions you used, and what markers you placed, while the heavy media resides in MXF directories like `Avid MediaFiles\MXF\...`; if you copy only the `.avb`, you’re just moving the edit blueprint, not the underlying media, so Avid will open it but show Media Offline until media is connected or relinked, and this architecture keeps bins small and shareable—so an `.avb` by itself cannot "play" unless paired with its media or another exported format.