1.1 Glossary

This document uses the following terms:

Advanced Systems Format (ASF): An extensible file format that is designed to facilitate streaming digital media data over a network. This file format is used by Windows Media.

broadcast: Live or prerecorded content that can be streamed to more than one client simultaneously.  The server streams the content to all clients from the same location, and does not allow clients to seek.

content: Multimedia data. content is always in ASF, for example, a single ASF music file or a single ASF video file.  Data in general. A file that an application accesses. Examples of content include web pages and documents stored on either web servers or SMB file servers.

globally unique identifier (GUID): A term used interchangeably with universally unique identifier (UUID) in Microsoft protocol technical documents (TDs). Interchanging the usage of these terms does not imply or require a specific algorithm or mechanism to generate the value. Specifically, the use of this term does not imply or require that the algorithms described in [RFC4122] or [C706] must be used for generating the GUID. See also universally unique identifier (UUID).

little-endian: Multiple-byte values that are byte-ordered with the least significant byte stored in the memory location with the lowest address.

live: Content that is streamed while it is still being encoded by an encoder.

non-pipelined mode: Mode of operation in which requests from the client must be sent on a TCP connection separate from the one being used by the server for streaming content to the client.

pipelined mode: Mode of operation in which requests from the client can be sent on the same TCP connection being used by the server for streaming content to the client.

playlist: One or more content items that are streamed sequentially.

session: The state maintained by the server when it is streaming content to a client. If a server-side playlist is used, the same session is used for all content in the playlist.

stream: A sequence of ASF media objects ([ASF] section 5.2) that can be selected individually. For example, if a movie has an English and a Spanish soundtrack, each may be encoded in the ASF file as a separate stream. The video data would also be a separate stream.

streaming: The act of transferring content from a sender to a receiver.

striding: Enables fast-forward and rewind the output of a file. Files must be indexed to take advantage of these features. An index is a series of values representing positions in the file (either presentation times, frame numbers, or SMTPE time codes) with corresponding offsets into the data section of the file for each.

MAY, SHOULD, MUST, SHOULD NOT, MUST NOT: These terms (in all caps) are used as defined in [RFC2119]. All statements of optional behavior use either MAY, SHOULD, or SHOULD NOT.