Using Video Game Footage - Part 2d

Ripping

ASF Files

I personally do not like the “Advanced Streaming Format”. The only time I use it is when I have to access footage that has been put on the web, or when someone submits a music video in the format. I have gotten a hold of a couple ASF files and my process only worked on three out of four of them, which are not very good odds.

Advanced Streaming Format is Microsoft’s new video format. It has a rather advanced CODEC, which is based on MPEG-4, and gives the user good quality at low bit rates, thought I have seen cases of audio and video going out of sync in larger files. Not a problem with music videos, but it could be a problem for large projects. It is primarily aimed at streaming delivery of medium, though it does a good job as a file based spec. By using ASF you do get a measure of simplicity, since the audio and video CODEC are specified by the file format, and not subject to change.

What it does not allow is conversion of the format to other formats. Microsoft will not allow any product to convert from ASF to any other editable format, and threatened the author of VirtualDub with legal action, since the author reverse engineered the spec to allow his application to read ASF files. That is why I have to use VirtualDub 1.3 to convert an ASF file to an AVI. Strangly I have found that tools provided by Microsoft themselves allow me to convert ASF files.

First thing you have to do is extract the VirtualDub 1.3 into its own directory. Remember to mark this version as different from the full 1.4 (or greater) version that you also have, since the only reason I still use 1.3 is to convert ASF files. The newer versions should be used for everything else.

Open VirtualDub 1.3 and choose to open the ASF file. Select Huffyuv as the compression CODEC, and choose to save the AVI. Leave everything else as default.

Another option is to use Graph Edit, a tool found in the DirectX SDK. What I do is render the media file in the graph, which should show you a progression of going from the Source file to a video renderer and audio renderer. I then delete the audio and video renderer, insert a Huffyuv CODEC item, and PCM audio item, and attach those two to where the audio and video was. I add an AVI Muxer, and attach the outputs of both the Huffyuv and the PCM to it, then add a file writer, and attach the output of the Muxer to it. I then play the graph, and 90% of the time I get a perfect AVI file out of it. Sometimes the audio and video drift apart. When that happens, I use TMPGEnc to convert the ASF to a video-only AVI file (since I have yet to get TMPGEnc to handle ASF audio well), and use the Graph Edit application to output a wav file(or ignore the wav if you only want the video portion for a music video). So actually, if you are using the footage as source for a music video, you could simply use TMPGEnc and extract a video only AVI.

These are now your “originals”.