| From: | Matt Sealey |
| Date: | 20 Sep 2000 at 20:13:27 |
| Subject: | Re: Anyone hear about ASX ? |
Hello Neil
On 19-Sep-00, you wrote:
> I can't play it on my PC unless I reboot :(
:)
>>> Don't you just love standards, especially the proprietary ones :<)
>
>> It's hardly a proprietary standard, is MPEG4. It's just the way Microsoft
>> decided to package it ;)
>
> MPEG4 isn't, but the ASF variation is. If MPEG4 is so good, why did M$
> have to mess with it? (that's a rhetorical question BTW). After a search
> of the various archives and search engines, I found the grand total of
> one player for this format, Microsofts own crappy Windows Media Player.
The DivX format is also a bastardisation of the MPEG4 format, which happens
to use AVI files as a container. MPEG4 is just a compression method, everything
else is meant to be slightly proprietary except how you compress and decompress
it.
Microsoft's ASn formats are really just a way of making people use something
different than MP3 - it just so happens that the technique is very standard,
yet in practice it's tied into Windows' API's for maximum performance. On any
other file format, you'd expect big-endian data storage, huge amounts of
header telling tyou what the file is about. IIRC, the ASn formats pretty much
melt into Media Player.
Thanks
Quote carefully and read all ADMIN:README mails