What is an ASF File?
An ASF file is a proprietary multimedia storage file that contains audio and video information in a container format. A typical ASF file may only have audio data, or both audio and video data. With these, it may also have other optional files containing metadata, such as its title, name of the author, bibliographic copyright data, etc. The ASF file format was primarily created for streaming media online.
The ASF format does not specify the codec to be used to encode the audio or video stored in the ASF container format. It only specifies the structure of how the audio or video streams online. The extension .WMA or .WMV is used to specify an ASF file that contains content encoded with the Windows Media Audio or Windows Media Video codecs, respectively.
The primary advantage of the ASF file format is its playback capability through many applications. The ASF format was created to stream media over the internet, thus it can be used to store multimedia online and view/listen to it over the internet without consuming too much bandwidth. It can be placed on HTTP servers and other digital media servers (as well as local storage devices) to be streamed over the internet.
Download ASF Sample Files
You can download .ASF sample files from below that are available in different resolutions, both with and without audio.
