Have you rendered the AVI directly with Maya? If so, the problem is not the fps. Maya creates uncompressed avi files which are not intented for playback purposes. You should recompress the avi to a new file using for example the DivX or an mpeg codec.

Imagine the following situation:
You have a 1 second long animation. Resolution is for example 640x480 and frame rate 30 fps. Bitdepth of the images is 8 bits / channel (rgb). That would mean the datarate would be:

30(fps) x 640(px) x 480(px) x 3(channels) x 8(bits per channel) = ~210 Mbit = ~26 megabytes per second

Clearly you can see that this is too much for a regular hard disk to keep up with. This is why they are constantly developing better and better codecs (compressor/decompressor) to reduce the datarate as much as possible while not loosing the image quality too much.