Advanced Streaming Format

From Saferpedia

ASF - Advanced Systems Format or Advanced Streaming Format. ASF is a multimedia format registered by Microsoft that formes a digital audio / video encoding. This format was specially created for mass-media streaming on the Internet.

ASF is based on serialized objects which are essentially byte sequences identified by a GUID marker.

The format specify the structure of the video/audio stream, similar to the function performed by the QuickTime, AVI, or Ogg container formats. One of the objectives of ASF was to support playback from digital media servers, HTTP servers, and local storage devices such as hard disk drives.

The most common file types contained within an ASF file are Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV). Note that the file extension abbreviations are different from the codecs which have the same name. Files containing only WMA audio can be named using a .WMA extension, and files of audio and video content may have the extension .WMV. Both may use the .ASF extension if desired.

ASF files can also contain objects representing metadata, such as the artist, title, album and genre for an audio track, or the director of a video track, much like the ID3 tags of MP3 files. It supports scalable media types and stream prioritization; as such, it is a format optimized for streaming.

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