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Advanced Systems Format (formerly Advanced Streaming Format, Active Streaming Format) is Microsoft's proprietary digital audio/digital video container format, especially meant for streaming media. ASF is part of the Windows Media framework.

The format does not specify how (i.e. with which codec) the video or audio should be encoded; it just specifies the structure of the video/audio stream. This is 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.

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

The most common filetypes contained within an ASF file are Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV). Note that the file extension abbreviations are similar in name to the codecs of the same name but are different things.

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.

Files containing only WMA audio can be named using a .wma extension, and files of only audio and video content may have the extension .wmv. Both may use the .asf extension if desired.

Certain error-correcting techniques related to ASF are patented in the United States (United States Patent 6,041,345 Levi, et al. March 21, 2000) by Microsoft. Although the format is publicly documented by Microsoft, its license limits implementations to closed-source development projects only. Apple's iTunes software (for Windows) now has the capability to convert WMA files to any iTunes-supported format.[1]

The ASF container provides the framework for digital rights management in Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video. An analysis of an older scheme used in WMA reveals that it is using a combination of elliptic curve cryptography key exchange, DES block cipher, a custom block cipher, RC4 stream cipher and the SHA-1 hashing function.

ASF files have MIME type application/vnd.ms-asf^[1] or video/x-ms-asf. (Advanced Stream Redirector (ASX) files also have MIME type video/x-ms-asf.)

ASF container-based media is usually streamed on the internet either through the MMS protocol or the RTSP protocol.

Although the ASF container format can technically include any codec, Microsoft's encoding tools (including Windows Media Encoder and Windows Movie Maker) produce ASF/WMA/WMV files using the DirectX Media Objects (DMO) framework. So far, third-party DMO-based codecs remain almost non-existent or extremely rare. Microsoft has threatened legal action for patent violation against (at least) one free software project aiming to allow playback of the format^[2].

• Advanced Stream Redirector (ASX)
• Comparison of container formats

1. ^ http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/vnd.ms-asf
2. ^ http://www.advogato.org/article/101.html

• ASF Specification
• ASF overview
• MSDN Windows Media Formats
• Discussion about Microsoft's use of the ASF patent
• Library of Congress analysis of ASF format sustainability
• ASF Container Format
• MSDN How To Embed Windows Media Player in a HTML Web Page (For Webmasters)
• Creating A Windows Media Custom Experience (For Webmasters)