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Progress Report & Thoughts |
Thoughts on ASF
July 7, 1997 |
Before reading more about ASF,
I was very enthusiastic about the possibility of using it. As I read more
and more, I was turned off!
As admitted by Microsoft, ASF is to be a replacement for the RIFF (Resource Interchange File Format) format designed by IBM & Microsoft. AVI, and WAV, conform to the RIFF format, which interleaves "chunks" of data of different types. Their claim is that ASF is to improve on RIFF by making three "fundamental" changes. These are:
According to Bart, Microsoft is not willing to share the specs of ASF easily. From what I have read, they were supposed to have made the specs public at the spring of 97 for public-review. This has not happened. I believe that ASF if too general to be well suited for streaming. Using RIFF as a base for ASF might be a bad idea. RIFF might have been built with emphasis on static media types, while ASF should be built with emphasis on streaming media types. One last thing. Libraries for ASF v1 are being written as C++ classes, whereas ASF v2 libraries will be offered as Active X (OLE/COM) objects. Ridiculous!!! I think we could learn a lot if we saw the specs for ASF but I think we would be better off implementing our own multiplexing stream protocol that is more strictly defined. I will explain what I have in mind in a later message. |
This page maintained by Kemal
Ispirli
For comments, send e-mail to kemal@npac.syr.edu |
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