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WMV is not built solely on Microsoft in-house technology. From version 7 (WMV7), Microsoft has used its own non-standard version of MPEG-4. The video stream is often combined with an audio stream of Windows Media Audio.
WMV files are customarily played by Windows Media Player on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh systems. Some third-party players also exist, such as MPlayer for Linux, which play back WMV by using the FFmpeg implementation of the WMV codecs.
Raw WMV video is packed into an AVI or Advanced Streaming Format (ASF) container. The resulting files may be named .avi if it is an AVI-contained file, or .wmv or .asf if it is an ASF file, but .wmv files are to be ASF files with audio/video content only.
WMV is usually found in the AVI file contianer when encoded with Microsoft's Windows Media Video 9 VCM software for Windows. Microsoft's Windows Media Player for the Mac does not support all WMV encoded files since it supports only the ASF file container.
WMV also features digital rights managementDigital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management DRM is an umbrella term for any of several arrangements which allows a vendor of content in electronic form to control the material and restrict its usage in various ways that can be specified b facilities.