SMPTE revisions sharpen the values of IMF

The three purposes were to resolve conflicts evident from different provisions, to ensure compliant implementation, and to introduce extra IMF system features.

Bruce Devlin, SMPTE standards VP, and founder of Mr MXF, explained: “The changes are there to meet real-world implementation and deployment challenges.

“The plug-fest alongside the IMF user group (imfug.com) creates a unique opportunity for standards designers, product specialists, operational staff and business managers to come together and create a truly harmonious system for deploying content at scale, in multiple versions, territories, and platforms,” he added.

The target is a multi-vendor environment with rock solid plug and play functionality.

“When you couple that with some of the open source initiatives out there, it is a real honour to be part of this gang,” said Devlin. “Spookily there isn’t really one big thing that the plug-fest called for. It is a bunch of little things that reflect changing working practices.

“For example, timecode is super-important as you get closer to live TV. In IMF, however, we have now recommended you do not use timecode because it creates more problems than it solves,” he added. “As the industry continues to change, IMF will subtly tighten some rules and relax others to ensure we keep efficiency high, interoperability high, and give operators the best choice of solutions possible.

“We are confident these new changes to the IMF standards documents will deliver genuine benefits to end users.”

The improvements manifest themselves in what we know as SMPTE ST 2067-2 IMF Core Constraints, ST 2067-3 IMF Composition Playlist, ST 2067-5 IMF Essence Component, and SMPTE 2067-21 IMF Application #2E. Many of these new revisions are available for free download.

• The full list of standards documents is available at smpte.org/free-standards-and-publications.