What are the reasons for compatibility issues with MXF?

With the manifold of potential sources for risks and the diversity of incompatibility issues there is only one straight-forward strategy. You need an MXF "gateway" which automatic corrects and reformats these diverse format variants into a full standard compliant format.

Extract only the essence and metadata which give value to your processes and secure that no uncertain or doubtful and potential risky data come through this barrier. This provides lean and low complexity files all with the exact same structure, as they are produced by the same mechanisms. This will minimize the format complexity and risk! There exist more than 50 standard documents to define all the specified variants of the MXF format. MXF initially has been developed as a complementary format to the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF). Technically, MXF applies as a subset of AAF and is designed to serve all interchange requirements a professional user can have with a file-based media container format. SMPTE accepted the wish of different media companies to get their proprietary formats included within the MXF family of standards. And of course the scope of requirements has broadened over the last decade from a pure video tape replacement format to the full diversity of a file- and stream-based utilization.

MXF Legalizer extensions:

• Loudness Correction (in conformance to current ITU and EBU recommendations)
• Dolby E to plain PCM conversion (still under development)

This means:

• the standard is designed to be highly flexible, which results in high complexity
• there is a significant degree of freedom in the standards documents resulting in differences in implementation details
• due to MXF complexity, only subsets of the standards are implemented by the different industry partners
• undefined or unclear details within the standards documents led to different interpretations and implementations
• there are interoperability issues on the wrapper, the encoder, the essence or the metadata level
• format describing metadata can be stored on different locations within the MXF file; this can result in contradictory information that is interpreted differently by different vendors
• in some cases, files cannot be used at all or even crash systems

MXF Legalizer enables standard compliance and interoperability – today!