ASF File Format

File Format Description

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. It supports data delivery over a wide variety of networks and protocols while still proving suitable for local playback.

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.

Causes of Failed Playback

Since ASF is a proprietary video and audio container format, it can be compressed using a variety of video codecs. That's the reason why you failed to playback ASF even on Windows Media Player which plays ASF files. So, if your existing video player states to support ASF fomrat but still fails to play it, you need to check and download and install the required codec or plug-ins. Alternatively, you can switch to another video player.