Can virus hidden as AVI be executed outside of a media player?

It is known that a file which is interpreted by the computer as being an AVI file could contain malware. See Can AVI files contain a virus?.

Looking at the main responses, they emphasize that if the computer recognizes the file as an AVI, then the file would need to exploit the media player that runs the file. My question is, if a file were engineered to be interpreted by the computer as an AVI, could the malware in the file run without the file being opened by a media player?