VideoReader - uncompressed 16-bit grayscale AVI

Is there a way to persuade a Matlab VideoReader object to correctly read a 16-bit uncompressed grayscale AVI file? The older (and soon to be removed) aviread handled it correctly. The corresponding aviwrite can write these files too.

Unfortunately VideoReader only seems to accept 8-bit AVI files. If you feed it a 16-bit grayscale video, it drops the top bit and handles it as RGB555 (which results in junk data). VideoWriter converts 16-bit frames to 8-bit (grayscale) AVIs too.

For now I can just use aviread, but with that being removed soon it'll become a major problem. I'm still getting more of these files (so just recoding them into lossless MJPEG2000 16-bit while I can won't help) and I can't change the format that they're provided in.

Relevant information: MATLAB 2013a (32-bit) Student Edition, Windows 7 (64-bit).