Where organizations like Xiph are permissive of their formats being used, Microsoft went the way of Fraunhofer in 2000 when they asked a developer who had reverse engineered the format to stop. It should be noted that any material encoded into ASF using software not authorized by Microsoft violates their patent rights. The factors for including these codecs were determined by a) how fast it could be encoded to, b) how performant systems were during decoding, and c) resulting quality. At the time, this move resulted in conflicts on different systems, so with the development of ASF, Microsoft instead adopted the leading video and audio codecs at the time. The format and its background contrasted with Microsoft's previous format AVI, in which Microsoft aimed to push for development of new and original codecs. While both codecs have been outclassed over time, WMV is still an accepted format by YouTube to upload files, and projects like FFmpeg are able to encode to earlier versions of it.

The Windows Media Video and Windows Media Audio codecs are staples of the Advanced Systems Format, in which Microsoft sought to find leading codecs on the market at the time of introduction.

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