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Topic: ASF playlists - why are they structured like that? (Read 3883 times) previous topic - next topic
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ASF playlists - why are they structured like that?

I wonder why ASF playlists are formatted as INI playlists and why they contain http:// links.

Using the example from this posting :

Code: [Select]
[Reference]
Ref1=http://216.246.37.51/702_16?MSWMExt=.asf
Ref2=http://216.246.37.51:80/702_16?MSWMExt=.asf

This is *highly* confusing. These links are in fact MMSH links. So I wonder why Microsoft did not decide to use "mmsh://" in the URLs, and put "http://" instead. VLC and mplayer replace "http" with "mmsh" if they see that this is an INI file and that the MIME type contained in the "Content-Type" HTTP response header is "video/x-ms-asf". But there is no explanation, and appears like the result of reverse engineering to me. Does anybody know a source that explains the rationale behind this playlist structure? Or is this yet another undocumented Microsoft feature/format?