On 19/01/2009 18:36, "Ian Forrester" <[email protected]> wrote: > Say, we had a ton of media assets from a BBC programme which we owned all the > rights to and wanted to distribute widely. Not just video, but images, sound, > subtitles, metadata about the programme scripts, etc. > > How would you > 1. Package it? > > We > were considering MXF - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MXF but it looks difficult > and time consuming to build, however the BBC did help build it so we could get > help. Matroska, Nut and QuickTime are also look worthy.
The point of view of an MXF advocate ... MXF is widely used at the professional end and capable of your requirements ... and the reasons why it is not easy to engage with straight out of the box is the shopping list that kicked off the standard. For example, efficient bit streams for file exchange between broadcast kit was more of a priority than human-readable XML. Also, MXF understands video frames and interleaves all the content so you can watch or listen to the streams as they transfer ... no waiting to unpack the package after transfer only to find out if it is the right one. As it is a media-specific standard, you can represent edit decision lists and metadata from the material essence ... could be a great way to do collaborative editing? You can distribute the large source clips once and then transfer lightweight EDLs around. MXF is an open standard and free to implement. The downside ... you need specialist tooling/APIs to get at the content. I was surprised to find that no Java API existing for MXF and its sister standard AAF, so I'm in the process of writing one (in development). http://majapi.sourceforge.net/ More complete C-based APIs are available here ... http://aaf.sourceforge.net/ http://www.freemxf.org/ In addition, a new XML format is now defined for MXF metadata which could be used in a tar or zip container, sidestepping the need for quite so much specialist (though free) tooling. Cheers, Richard -- Dr Richard Cartwright media systems architect portability4media.com [email protected] mobile +44 (0)7792 799930 - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
