Producing streaming multimedia content or events involves great planning, practice, and some experimentation.

If you came to this page for a quick recommendation on which codecs to use for a particular project, check out the Codecs Guide.

First Things First: ASF

ASF stands for Active Streaming Format, and represents the file format that NetShow content is created in. It is a low-overhead storage and transmission file format that encapsulates multimedia data types (images, audio, video) as well as embedded text (URLs, for example), and allows for the synchronization of these objects within a stream. When you create NetShow content, you create ASF streams or files. For more information about ASF, see the ASF Web site.

Next, decide where you want to go today:

• Learn how to get the most from your NetShow player
• Learn how to create stored NetShow content
• Learn how to take NetShow content and incorporate it into your Web pages or applications
• Learn how to host live or stored NetShow content (the server side of things)