General Exchange Format

Internet media typeType code"gxf "Initial release2001 (2001)Type of formatContainer formatContainer foraudiovisual material

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,^[1] and was extended in SMPTE RDD 14-2007^[2] 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.^[3] 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 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 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 is a DirectShow filter that enables Windows MediaPlayer and other DirectShow-based applications to play back GXF files.

References