Windows Media Video

Windows Media Video (WMV) is a file type which can contain video in one of several video compression formats developed by Microsoft. The original video compression format used in the file, also known as WMV, was originally designed for Internet streaming applications, as a competitor to RealVideo. The other compression formats, such as WMV Screen and WMV Image, cater for specialized content. After standardization by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), WMV 9 was adopted for physical-delivery formats such as HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

History

In 2003, Microsoft drafted a video compression specification based on its WMV 9 format and submitted it to SMPTE for standardization. The standard was officially approved in March 2006 as SMPTE 421M, better known as VC-1, thus making the WMV 9 format an open standard. VC-1 became one of the three video formats for the Blu-ray video disc, along with H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC.

Container format

A WMV file uses the Advanced Systems Format (ASF) container format to encapsulate the encoded multimedia content. While the ASF can encapsulate multimedia in other encodings than those the WMV file standard specifies, those ASF files should use the .ASF file extension and not the .WMV file extension.