ASF video format introduction and related free ASF converter software downloads.
ASF Format Introduction:
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.
ASF is based on serialized objects which are essentially byte sequences identified by a GUID marker.
The format does not specify how 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.
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. The current version of Windows Media Encoder produces files with the extension .WMA and .WMV. These files are identical to the old .ASF files but for their extension and MIME-type. According to Microsoft, the change in extensions was made to make it easier for an application to identify the content of a media file. Although this differentiation was introduced in 2003, to this date most webbrowsers do not function as might be expected with the 'new' extensions: even when a .wma or .wmv file is specifically encoded for progressive download, browsers still proceed to completely download the file before playing it. This can, however, be easily remedied by simply renaming the .wma or .wmv file to the old extension .asf.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Systems_Format
Free ASF Converter Software:
Our free ASF converter software supports converting from ASF, doesn't support converting to ASF.
| Software Name | Convert from ASF | Convert to ASF |
| Free Video Converter | Support | Not support |
| Free Video Cutter | Support | Not support |
| Free Video Joiner | Support | Not support |
Related Downloads:
Free Video Converter is a free video converter software to convert video files between many formats or extract audio from video files.
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