The MXF Book
Written by a top team of industry professionals, this must-have guide introduces and explains the MXF standard, helps engineers write MXF applications, and explains the reasons behind many details of the specification documents.
TABLE OF CONTENTS The MXF Book
Chapter 14: The MXFLib Open Source Library
Matt Beard
Introduction
This chapter gives a basic introduction to the key principles of the MXFLib Open Source library. MXFLib is a fully featured library that allows reading, writing, and modifying of MXF files. It gives an easy-to-use interface to structural and descriptive metadata, as well as flexible essencehandling features and full indexing and encryption support.
The library can be downloaded from the project web page at: http://www.freemxf.org .
Intention
MXF is an advanced and feature-rich format that can be used in many ways throughout production, distribution, and archiving. However, its flexibility means that supporting MXF is not as simple as other more limited formats.
MXFLib is intended to help the uptake of the format by reducing the amount of time and effort required to add MXF support to applications. There are three main ways of using MXFLib.
As an Off-the-Shelf Library
MXFLib may be used unmodified to add MXF support. Most applications can use MXFLib in an unmodified form taking advantage of a full range of metadata and essence-processing features. This is the easiest way to get started with MXFLib-based development and, unless there are specific non-standard requirements, is generally the best option.
As a Starting Point for Proprietary Software
For applications that have unusual requirements or are tied closely to specific hardware, the library can be extended or modified. This can be as simple as adding proprietary essence handling classes or so far reaching that the source code is almost entirely rewritten. Of course the...
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