ASF Support in Media Foundation

Media Foundation supports media files in the Advanced Systems Format (ASF):

  • Windows Media Video (WMV files)
  • Windows Media Audio (WMA files)

Media Foundation provides several objects for reading and writing ASF files. These objects are provided in two different architectural layers.

First, the pipeline layer contains objects that work inside the Media Foundation pipeline and conform to the APIs defined by the pipeline. The ASF pipeline layer contains:

Second, the WM Container layer provides low-level control over parsing and writing an ASF file. The pipeline layer uses WMContainer internally. Applications can also use WMContainer for low-level ASF parsing and writing.

diagram showing elements of the pipeline layer and the wm container

In this section

Topic Description
ASF File Structure
Overview of the ASF file structure and the objects provided by Media Foundation to work with ASF files.
Pipeline Layer ASF Components
Describes how to parse and author ASF files using the pipeline layer.
WMContainer ASF Components
Describes how to parse and author ASF files using the WMContainer layer.

For detailed information about the structure of an ASF file, see the ASF specification, which can be downloaded from this Microsoft website.

Media Foundation Programming Guide