Guidelines: MXF Application Specification
Audio-Visual Working Group
Draft under development.
The Working Group began drafting an MXF Application Specification for archiving and preservation in 2009. In 2012-15, the effort continued under the auspices of the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), where the specification has been assigned the identifier AS-07. AMWA has approved the June 2016 version as an official Proposed Specification.
AS-07 offers a detailed specification for a file "wrapper," one key part of a digital file format for audio-visual preservation. The specification includes a list of permitted encoded essences (the underlying content bitstreams), defines a means for the carriage of multiple timecodes; the handling of captions, subtitles, and Timed Text; a minimal core metadata set; program segmentation metadata; and embedded content integrity data.
The overall application specification has been written broadly, to cover a wide range of audio-visual content. AMWA specifications, however, allow for the creation of what are called shims, special profiles with added constraints to fit a narrower application. The AS-07 development team has prepared one shim for release at the time of initial publication: the AS-07 Baseband Shim: Single Items from Baseband Video. This shim is intended to serve the most critical current needs of many archives: the reformatting of older analog and digital videotapes and, for some organizations, the encoding and packaging of "live" video streams sent to an archive via a serial interface. The details for AS-07 Baseband Shim are presented in appendix J of the most recent drafts of the specification.
We are eager to receive comments on the specification.
SPECIFICATION UNDER DEVELOPMENT
Current draft posted at the AMWA Web site:
- June 2016: AS-07 (includes Baseband Shim as table in Appendix J) (114 pages)
- Note: The AS-07 Application Specification continues to evolve thanks to peer review and feedback. Until a new version is published, a live list of updates to the current version is available here.
A set of graded sample files based on the June 2016 AS-07 Application Specification is available.
Earlier draft posted at the AMWA Web site:
- September 2015: AS-07 (includes Baseband Shim as table in Appendix J) (111 pages)
- September 2014: AS-07 (includes Baseband Shim as table in Appendix J) (89 pages)
Earlier drafts (at the FADGI site):
- October 2012: MXF Application Specification for Archiving and Preservation, version 1k
- August 2011: MXF Application Specification for Archiving and Preservation, version 1h
- October 2010: MXF Application Specification for Archiving and Preservation, version 1d
BACKGROUND DOCUMENTS
- Items in bold are most useful.
- September 2015: User Needs and MXF Options: Preservation Planning and the AS-07 Specification, (current version) 25 pages.
- September 2014: User Needs and MXF Options: Preservation Planning and the AS-07 Specification, (earlier version) 20 pages.
- January 2013: Working list of generalized user requirements, 3 pages.
- August 2011: Preservation Video File Format Issues and Considerations, 11 pages.
- October 2010: Audio-Visual Format Documentation: Background Paper, August 2011, 14 pages.
- November 2010: Notes from user-community technical meeting at AMIA/IASA joint conference, 5 pages.
- October 2010: JPEG 2000 profile illustrative sketch, 3 pages.
Last Updated: 5/24/2016