ASFRecorder

There are many file formats used to store multimedia content in a struggle to provide better quality and take up less disk space. Some got better over the years, but you still need a dedicated application that can read the specific format you want to play. Dedicated to Windows Media Player streams, ASFRecorder comes as a straightforward playback solution.

Just so you get an idea of what it can do and not to spend too much time before playing your media files, this application doesn’t even require an installation process to work. This means that your system registries remain intact, and you can also use it on other computers directly from an USB Flash drive.

There’s a high chance that the application makes a poor first impression, with all features wrapped in a rather outdated windows style, that leaves a bit more to be desired, at least at a visual level. The main window only shows a few playback buttons, such as play, pause and stop, as well as a progress slider.

Sooner or later you end up using the file menu in order to grab some file, because dragging them over the main window has no effect. One possibility is to load media content from an URL, or open a file from your hard disk drive. Supported formats include ASF, WMA, WMV, MP2, MP3, MPG, MOV, and WAV.

Playback automatically starts as soon as you load a file. You’re limited to a single file, because there’s no built-in playlist. In case of a video, a preview screen is brought up, and you can resize it to fit on the whole screen, but can’t actually make it full screen.

In case you’re trying to connect to a custom URL for multimedia playback, the application gives you the possibility to connect via Proxy. You can register ASF files to be played only with this application alone.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that ASFRecorder is a rather outdated choice when it comes to multimedia playback. Starting from the poorly-designed interface, and ending with the shallow set of features, the application barely manages to keep up with modern competition, and definitely needs some more work.