SANTA CLARA, CA - Hammering home its commitment to the MFX file format, Snell & Wilcox, at NAB, will release a free comprehensive set of software developer tools - called MXF Express - designed to help broadcasters and equipment vendors ensure interoperability among file-sharing products and systems. The company will also freely release MXF Desktop, a software-based MXF file player that will bring MXF compatibility to any Windows PC desktop.
MXF (Material eXchange Format) is a major new building block for IT-based broadcast and post production environments offering a unique combination of several essential key features: Platform independence including compression, network protocol and operating systems; extensive support for metadata and improved workflows; packetized and streaming file-based capability; an open industry format with broad-based support from industry vendors; interoperability tested between industry vendors and extensible for future source formats, metadata schemes etc.
Snell & Wilcox engineers played a critical role in the definition and standardization of MXF. As part of their standardization work, the company's research engineers developed over several years - through hundreds of man hours of R&D - a package of software tools that enable users to create products that conform to the MXF specification. Those tools are included in the free releases of MXF Express and MXF Desktop.
Broadcasters, such as CNN, CBS and BBC, have announced support in their facilities for MXF. Top broadcast technology vendors including Sony, Avid, Thomson, JVC, Leitch, Da Vinci, Matrox, Cisco, SGI, Quantel, and Seachange have joined Snell & Wilcox in supporting the MXF format in their products. The broadcast industry has demanded total interoperability between all vendor implementations of the MXF standard and Snell & Wilcox's MXF Express is designed to help ensure that all manufacturers meet that goal with all first generation products.
MXF Express features include support for OP1a, OP-Atom, MPEG, DV, BWAV and AES profiles that allow various media configurations within a single MXF file; C++ libraries that enable developers to add MXF awareness to their products (including sample code for creating MXF writers / readers); direct show filters for easy MXF player / writer creation (including sample code for creating MXF players); high-quality sample MXF files for testing and evaluation (based on the Snell & Wilcox "Test Card M").
The contents of the MXF Express SDK were proven internally by Snell & Wilcox engineers who used it to create several file-based products with sophisticated MXF-based functionality. These include Ingest Station, a high quality compression mastering system; Mosalina, an automated MPEG quality control software application; and MediaX, a powerful PCI-based hardware accelerator engine designed to bring Snell & Wilcox core algorithms and signal processing expertise to the IT domain.
MXF Desktop, a software application that adds MXF awareness to PCs running Windows XP or Windows 2000 operating systems: enables Microsoft's Windows Media Player to play MXF files; allows easy viewing of key metadata within an MXF file via the right click properties command in Windows Explorer; and enables WAV, MPEG and DV formats to be "wrapped" as essence into an MXF file.