ASF (Advanced Streaming/Systems Format)

Advanced Streaming Format (ASF, later renamed into Advanced Systems Format) is Microsoft's proprietary digital audio/digital video wrapper, especially meant for streaming. ASF is part of the Windows Media framework.

The format does not specify how the video or audio should be encoded, but instead just specifies the structure of the video/audio stream. What this means is that ASF files can be encoded with basically any audio/video codec and still would be in ASF format.

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.

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