One way to provide global optimization and to eliminate jitter due to packet ordering is to explicitly interleave the packets. Active Streaming Format (ASF) has been developed by Microsoft to do exactly this. ASF is a data format specification to interleave data types including JPEG, QuickTime, AVI, MPEG, GIF, HTML, and URL’s. It supports dynamic definition of new streaming data types using Microsoft’s ActiveMovie media architecture (which I will discuss later). ASF allows a variety of error correction techniques to be employed.

For more information on ASF, see http://www.microsoft.com/advtech/activemovie/amstream.html.