It's also a codec designed for Internet streaming applications, whose main competitor is RealVideo. In 2003, Microsoft developed a video codec specification based on its WMV9 codec and submitted to the SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) for application as an open standard. The standard code was SMPTE 421M, and its informal name was VC-1. Since then, VC-1 has become one of the three major video codecs supporting BD-ROM and HD DVD-ROM, in addition to MPEG-2 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. Many people may be confused about the difference between ASF and WMV. In most cases, WMV video are wrapped in Microsoft's ASF container format whose full name is Advanced Streaming Format. It's a container format developed by Microsoft specifically for streaming media. wmv extension is usually an ASF format file using the WMV codec. Microsoft recommends that if the ASF format file contains a non-Microsoft codec, it is better to use the. In general, the audio encoding interlaced with WMV video is WMA (Windows Media Audio). Although WMV compressed video is usually wrapped using ASF file format, it could also be wrapped inside other file containers like AVI and MKV. Windows Media Player is the default WMV player for Windows.

To play WMV files on Mac, you may install Perian, which is the swiss-army knife of QuickTime components.

How to play wmv videos on mac