How can I play .asf files on my Mac?

I've used MPlayer to play ASF, so it should work if you have the right codecs. You may need the freely available (from the mplayer website) win32 dlls, but I'm not on OS X, so I'm not sure.

I can't seem to find an mplayer with a front-end that works. (Hell, I don't even know what that means) Anyone with a direct link?

Have you tried http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/?

Yes. Downloaded, opened the file, but nothing happened.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ seems to be able to open every media format under the sun, and ASF is listed as a http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html.

Like thebabelfish mentions, though, you don't always have the right codecs. ASF, like WMV and AVI and Quicktime, is a container format -- inside that container could be data encoded using just about any codec under the sun. And unfortunately, on OSX you don't have the option of using the win32 DLL packages since obviously x86 DLLs aren't going to be runnable on a PPC. Add to that the fact that some Windows Media files can be "protected" from playing using DRM -- which doesn't work for squat on anything but Windows -- and it's a near certainty that a certain number of media files out there won't ever play on your Mac. If mplayer, vlc, and Windows Media Player for Macintosh won't play it, chances are you're screwed.

Hey, why not just go to goodwill and drop a fiver on any PC faster than a 486? It's easier than just about any of the other suggestions. :-)

Also, I'm pretty sure that recent builds of mplayer for OSX -- those with broader codec support -- only run on OSX version 10.3 and above. There might be an older version out there that supports the older OS, but it's very likely it doesn't have the same feature set. I'm under the impression there are recent vlc builds for older OSes, though (but my recall has been known to be pretty faulty at times.)

VLC didn't work either. I have one other option. I still run Virtual PC. The reason I didn't mention that yet was because I recently reformatted and I never bothered to reinstall because I'll be upgrading to Panther shortly. Will VPC work, or does the Direct X aspect screw me?