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libMXF

README.md

libMXF

libMXF is a low-level C library for reading and writing the SMPTE ST 377-1 MXF file format.

libMXF was originally developed as part of the Ingex Project where it supported MXF transfer, playback and storage applications. libMXF was also used in the BBC Archive Preservation Project to migrate BBC archive content from video tapes to files.

The MXFDump MXF text dumper utility from the AAF SDK is provided in this project for convenience.

Examples

A number of applications and library code can be found in the examples directory. These are not part of the core library and are not required to build libMXF++ or bmx.

  • archive: library code and utilities used in the BBC Archive Preservation Project.
  • avidmxfinfo: library and utility for extracting metadata about Avid MXF OP-Atom files. This utility has been superseded by mxf2raw in the bmx project.
  • reader: library code used by the Ingex Player for reading MXF files.
  • transfertop2: utilities used in the TransferToP2 application to allow edited sequences to be transferred from an editing system to a P2 card.
  • vlc: legacy code that was written to test how easy it would be to support MXF in VLC.
  • writeaviddv50: example utility for writing DV 50 MBit/s video in Avid MXF OP-Atom files.
  • writeavidmxf: library code and utility for writing Avid MXF OP-Atom files. This utility has been superseded by raw2bmx in the bmx project.

Build, Test and Install

libMXF is developed on Ubuntu Linux but is supported on other Unix-like systems and Windows.

The cmake build system is used, with minimum version 3.12. The build requires the git tool along with the C/C++ compilers.

The build process has been tested on Ubuntu, Debian, MacOS and Windows (Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 v15.9.51 and later versions).

Dependencies

The uuid library (Ubuntu / Debian package name uuid-dev) is required for non-Apple Unix-like systems.

Commands

A basic commandline process is described here for platforms that default to the Unix Makefiles or Visual Studio cmake generators. See build.md for more detailed build options.

Replace <build type> in the commandlines below with Debug or Release. Note that the Visual Studio generator supports multiple build types for a configuration, which is why the build type is selected after configuration.

The default generator can be overridden using the cmake -G option. The list of available generators is shown at the end of the output of cmake --help.

Start by creating a build directory and change into it. The commandlines below use a out/build build directory in the working tree, which follows the approach taken by Microsoft Visual Studio C++.

Unix-like (Unix Makefiles)

mkdir -p out/build
cd out/build
cmake ../../ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=<build type>
cmake --build .
make test
sudo make install

If not using macOS, run ldconfig to update the runtime linker cache. This avoids library link errors similar to "error while loading shared libraries".

sudo /sbin/ldconfig

Windows (Visual Studio)

mkdir out\build
cd out\build
cmake ..\..\
cmake --build . --config <build type>
ctest -C <build type>
cmake --build . --config <build type> --target install

Source and Binary Distributions

Source distributions, including dependencies for the Windows build, and Windows binaries are made available as in bmx.

License

The libMXF library is provided under the BSD 3-clause license. See the COPYING file provided with this library for more details.