Me vs. Streaming Media: Fighting the ASX File and Discovering MIME

Technobabble can be pretty overwhelming, and it's growing exponentially as we become more computer dependent. Acronyms for online languages are many and proliferating, confusing the heck out of the average reader. This article is about a particular file type, specifically an .asx file, and the unholy incantations, alliances and contortions required to get the thing to work.

With the advent of the Internet age, we members of the human race have been handed the inalienable right to get used to acronyms. There are countless shorthand phrases and names online and without learning them, you'll be left out in the proverbial cold.

Of course, there's also another aspect to the insanity: the squished-together characters that represent web-building languages and file types. HTML is shorthand for Hyper-Text Markup Language. There's CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheets. You can add to that PHP, for Hypertext Preprocessor. (Yes, I know the last one's out of sequence. Take that, o dyslexic creators of web languages!)

Each of respective format produces a file that ends in its acronym. An HTML page generally ends in the extension "html" and PHP in the extension "php." In fact, whether or not you see it, every online file has an extension that reflects its language. HTML is the mothership of web-building, but it's got its limits. If you want a dynamic page, one that allows you to change content easily and frequently, you're going to need to use something like PHP or ASP.

And then there's streaming media.

As computer speeds accelerate and as broadband access expands, we web-surfers are drawn to the more complex features, including streaming music and video. That means web designers need to know precisely how to insert streaming media into a web page, or they're obsolete in the world of web creation.

Therein lies the heart of this article. You see, I'm more than happy to write articles explaining how to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and such. But to paraphrase Scarlett O'Hara, "So help me God, I'll never touch streaming media again!"

Oh all right. That's probably not entirely true, since I ultimately did figure things out; but a few weeks ago I'd have been willing to bet on it.

When I was recently asked to add their streaming link to one of our radio-station client sites, my response was a cheerful, "No problem!" After all, I had a pretty good grasp on the web-building process by now, and a friend and former webmaster of a TV/feature film studio assured me it's a matter of adding a simple link to the coding. Piece of cake, right?

Well, it was a piece of cake to add the link.

Trouble was, nobody knew how to make the link actually stream their audio programming. No matter what I did, the link popped merrily up... as text.

Backtracking a little here as I try to make the incomprehensible a bit simpler to digest. In order to create a streaming media page online, you need to process the media (video or audio) through a page with an extension of .asx. It's only about six lines of coding. It's a tiny file, a tiny extension, and what should be a simple process to add it. The operative word here being, "should."

I don't know off the top of my head what ASX stands for, but as you can probably imagine, over the course of the three weeks or thereabouts that we kept fighting with this thing I came up with several choice and unsavory suggestions for what could be DONE with an .asx file. (None that can be published here, I might add.)

After picking the brains of every technerd I knew and mostly getting back the all-powerful, "I dunno," all I knew for sure was that the server didn't know how to parse (a fancy word for "interpret") an .asx page.

Well that's a big DUH, pardner.

Unfortunately online searches came up empty when I typed in, "ASX PARSES AS TEXT," and "ASX WON'T PLAY STREAMING MEDIA," and several variations thereof. I got lots of search results, just nothing useful.

Finally, I went to one last tech friend and begged him to give me every detail of what he saw as the problem, promising my firstborn and whatever else he wanted, if only he could help me find a solution.

That, my friends, was the right move. Somewhere along with scratching his head and commenting the ever-popular, "I dunno," my tech connection mentioned the acronym "MIME." And the heavens opened and the Google.com gods answered, and answered with something usable. It was so simple it bordered on the sickening, in fact. If you are working on a website and there is a file inside the website called .htaccess, or you can upload/add one there, all you have to do is add one stinking line:

AddType video/x-ms-asf asf asx

That, boys and girls, was it. Three weeks of agonizing that we were going to be screwed (since we'd already spent the money for this website) and it all boiled down to that.

The moral of the story is that acronyms are evil, and whatever you do, bookmark this page. You never know when you too will be asked to fix a streaming MIME.