On Sunday, October 5th Tom Lorenz will give an oral presentation

The presentation is about a client media migration project at ORF archive (Austrian Television - largest broadcaster in Austria). We delivered a solution for restoring high amounts of defective MXF D10 video files at ORF TV-Archives. The fact that Cube-Tec has developed a unique solution to fix these kind of problems without touching the video essence itself is very interesting for the archive community.

Solution for automatic repair of defective MXF Files at ORF TV-Archives

In 2013 the Austrian Plublic bradcaster ORF detected during a migration-project a defective collection of MXF files, which originated from an earlier mass migration project of SD video tapes (2010-2011). In total, about eight thousand hours of video material were affected to a degree that no further usage was possible.

Re-ingestion of the original video tapes was not an option because of cost and time constraints. ORF was seeking for a solution that is capable to repair the damaged files, preferable software-based and without the necessity to transcode the affected files. This task became a part of the DAVID project (EU research project), where ORF had the role of a user-partner in the consortium.

Cube-Tec as another partner of this consortium received a representative subset of damaged files for pre-investigation. The material was analyzed to find the origin and symptomatic of the occurring errors..

As a result, a customized repair tool has been developed. This version can now fully automatically detect the occurring errors in different combinations, in the MXF container as well as in the MPEG bitstream. With this new procedure, errors are fixed selectively, and at the same time the bitstream is wrapped into a fully standard-compliant MXF file. Neither re-encoding nor re-wrapping would have solved these problems.

The Cube-Tec team provides the operation and maintenance of this repair service via remote supervision; the repair throughput is more than 2 TB of data a day on a single server. The progress of the repair process as well as results of the file checks are automatically monitored and reported monthly in consolidated form.

The presentation is giving an actual example, where a small and undetected error from an “early-adopter-project” with big impact on the collection was solved without any negative consequences for the affected content and with a minimal budget. The initial situation, the impact on the collection, the challenge, the development-steps and the final solution will be presented, to give the audience a detailed insight of the task.