Advanced systems format

Advanced Systems Format (formerly also the English Advanced Streaming Format, Active Streaming Format ) is a file format developed by Microsoft that contains streaming audio and video . ASF is part of Windows Media . The format is suitable both for local playback , and for transmission and playback on computer networks , including the Internet .

ASF is a multimedia container and does not indicate how data should be encoded, but only defines the structure of the data stream. In this regard, ASF is replacing the AVI multimedia container format. This is an extensible format that can contain data encoded using various codecs and supports stream synchronization .

The most commonly used file extension is .asf , and the MIME type is video / x-ms-asf . In addition, files containing predominantly audio information may have the extension .wma , and video files may have the extension .wmv . The .asf extension is usually used for files containing data encoded by third-party (non- Microsoft ) codecs .

Format Features:

• Possibility of streaming playback;
• Priority management of threads
• Multilingualism;
• Extensibility, the ability to dynamically load components and codecs;
• DRM support;
• Advanced annotation and metadata usage.

A feature of the ASF format is the ability to play directly at the time of downloading data over the network , that is, streaming playback. RTSP is commonly used for transferring ASF streams over IP networks.

To use this format, licensing from Microsoft is required.