TABLE OF CONTENTS MXF is quite new. The standard was only a few months old when this book was printed. There will be a significant amount of implementation work going on to create an interoperability environment in which MXF can seamlessly transport information across the whole multimedia workflow environment. There is currently a strong spirit of cooperation among manufacturers, users, and content owners, who are working together to bring a new IT-based workflow infrastructure to reality.
One of the main areas of implementation work is interoperability testing and interchange. The Implementers group is currently a subgroup within the Pro-MPEG Forum (http://www.pro-mpeg.org) and is concerned with evaluating whether implementation problems are the result of poor specification, poor implementation, or ambiguity in the writing of the specification. The group will also act as a forum for the interchange of content between different MXF implementers to ensure that the end users reach their ultimate goal equipment from different vendors working together seamlessly.
MXF files encode all essence and metadata in its native KLV format. From the beginning, the need for a text-based representation of MXF header metadata has been recognized. The main requirement is that it reflects the structure of the MXF metadata. The XML (Extensible Markup Language) is ideally suited for this purpose, being an internationally accepted open standard designed for the exchange of structured text and data that is intended for dissemination and publication on a variety of media.
XML is actually classed as a...
