Multimedia Glossary List
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Glossary: A
ASF
Advanced Streaming Format. Microsoft's new audio/video format, meant specifically for streaming purposes. It doesn't specify how the video or audio should be encoded, but instead just specifies the structure of the video/audio stream. This means that ASF files can be encoded with basically any audio/video codec and would still be in ASF format.
Many times ASF is confused with Microsoft's implementation of MPEG-4 video format, because most of the ASF streams are encoded using this technology.
AVI
AVI stands for Audio Video Interleave.
This is a container video format that specifies certain structure how the audio and video streams should be stored within the file. AVI itself doesn't specify how it should be encoded (just like the streaming format ASF), so the audio/video can be stored in very various ways. Most commonly used video codecs that use AVI structure are M-JPEG and DivX.
AVI contains code called FourCC which tells what codec it is encoded with.
