Advanced Systems Format (formerly Advanced 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.

The format does not specify how the video or audio should be encoded, but instead just specifies the structure of the video/audio stream. What this means is that ASF files can be encoded with basically any audio/video codec and still would be in ASF format. This is similar to the function performed by the QuickTime, AVI, or Ogg formats. One of the objectives of the ASF format was to support playback from digital media servers, HTTP servers, and local storage devices.

The ASF format is based on serialized objects which are essentially byte-sequences identified by a GUID marker.

The most common filetypes contained within an ASF file are Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV).

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.

Files containing only WMA audio can be named using a .wma extension, and files of only audio and video content may have the extension .wmv. Both may use the .asf extension if desired.

Certain error-correcting techniques related to ASF are patented in the United States (United States Patent 6,041,345 Levi, et al. March 21, 2000) by Microsoft. Although the format is publicly documented by Microsoft, its license limits implementations to closed-source development projects only. Interestingly, Apple's iTunes software now has the capability to convert WMA files to any iTunes supported format.[1]

The ASF container provides the framework for digital rights management in Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video. An analysis of an older scheme used in WMA reveals that it is using a combination of elliptic curve cryptography key exchange, DES block cipher, a custom block cipher, RC4 stream cipher and the SHA-1 hashing function.

ASF files have MIME type application/vnd.ms-asf or video/x-ms-asf. (Advanced Stream Redirector (ASX) files also have MIME type video/x-ms-asf.)

The ASF container is usually streamed on the net through Microsoft's proprietary MMS protocol.