Demuxing "streaming" ASF files

[Blkbird]

Recently I've got a lot of ASF files. Some are "normal", others seem to "recorded streams", meaning although the entire data is offline so you don't need any network connection to play the video, you cannot skip to any point, nor do you even know the length of the video.

What I like to know first is, if I demux the video out of the f*ing ASF container and remux it into AVI (or OGM, MKV, whatever), would I be able to skip back and forth in the video then? Or do I need to build some sort of index for video first before I remux it?

The second question is of course, what tools can be used to demux ASF. ASF Tools seems inactive for one and a half year now, and Windows Media Encoder is from Microsoft (shredder), some old versions of VirtualDub(Mod) are also somewhat funky... Is there any other ASF processing tools? I read in the changelog of VDubMod 1.5.10.1, "Removed ASF support in the code. There are better tools out there for ASF." So what are those better tools?

Thanks for any help in advance.

PS: I should include the "standard claimer" that I did do a search for what I want to know. The result was partially helpful, but not sufficient.

[Atamido]

I had some ASF streams that I captured and they had the same problem. I used GraphEdit and connected the ASF demuxer to the Matroska muxer. The resulting file was smaller, and had no seeking problems.

[DKDIB]

Blkbird wrote:
> Recently I've got a lot of ASF files. Some are "normal", others seem
> to "recorded streams" [...]

You can use AsfTools (http://www.geocities.com/myasftools/) to change the streaming flag into the ASF files.



Blkbird also wrote:
> [...] I demux the video out of the f*ing ASF container and remux it
> into AVI (or OGM, MKV, whatever), would I be able to skip back and
> forth in the video then?

Yes, of course. ;)
The best way to do that probably is ASF2mkv Recorder (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82303&package_id=102471) (despaite the name it can remux both ASF and WMV).

[Blkbird]

Thanks for your answers. I've tried both ASF2MKV and doing the job manually in GraphEdit using Gabest's latest muxer, with almost identical result (only 9 bytes are different, probably creation time and stuff).

The problem is now, I can't play neither files in my Zoom Player using Gabest's latest splitter! I've played other MKV files successfully with my current configuration, though, so I don't know what's wrong. Besides, the MKV files (of same size) are not smaller, but larger than the ASF file.