General eXchange Format (GXF) is a file exchange format for the transfer of simple and compound clips between television program storage systems. It is a container format that can contain Motion JPEG (M-JPEG), MPEG, or DV-based video compression standards, with associated audio, time code, and user data that may include user-defined metadata.
GXF was developed by Grass Valley Group, then standardized by SMPTE as SMPTE 360M, and was extended in SMPTE RDD 14-2007 to include high-definition video resolutions.
GXF has a fairly simple data model compared with SMPTE MXF container format since it should be used for file transfers and not as a storage format with no editing capabilities. SMPTE RDD 14-2007 is only 57 pages long, compared with many hundreds of pages for the MXF standards.
Applications and tools
Applications
- The FFmpeg multimedia converter and VLC media player free video player support GXF;
- theScribe LITE Archived 2010-07-25 at the Wayback Machine is a GXF player that also supports MXF.
Parser and checker
- Grassvalley offers a win32-based tool "tstream", for parsing GXF files and checking to ensure the contents conform to spec.
Tools
- GXF::SDK Archived 2010-06-17 at the Wayback Machine is a C++ [SDK] that implements the GXF standard to ease the reading, creation, sub-clipping, merge and rewrap of GXF files. It supports: MPEG video, DV, PCM, AC3 and Dolby E audio, Timecode, AFD, VBI and ANC;
- GXFDShowFilter Archived 2010-06-14 at the Wayback Machine is a DirectShow filter that enables Windows MediaPlayer and other DirectShow-based applications to play back GXF files.
References
SMPTE 360M http://store.smpte.org/product-p/smpte%200360-2009.htm ↩
SMPTE RDD 14-2007 http://store.smpte.org/product-p/rdd%2014-2007.htm ↩
File interchange formats http://broadcastengineering.com/mag/broadcasting_file_interchange_formats/ ↩