You may have found an old Avid drive containing MXF or OMF files compressed with Meridien codecs. Sometimes these are known by their compression ratio, e.g. “2:1” or “14:1”.<\/p>\n
Because of the combination of the MXF\/OMF container and the Meridien codec, rarely found in modern software apart from Avid, these files can be difficult to play, even if your QuickTime installation contains the Avid-distributed codecs.<\/p>\n
So how can you view these files for free?<\/p>\n
Easy. Avid Meridien compression is actually MJPEG – Motion JPEG compression. The free and open-source utility FFmpeg has a sister player: FFplay. Even though it doesn’t know how to find an MJPEG codec inside an MXF OP1A wrapper, or an Avid OMF wrapper, you can tell it what to do with a simple command line. Then, you can view any Meridien-compressed MXF or OMF files on your drive.<\/p>\n
As a guide, MXF video files are named in the following way:<\/p>\n
“ When the letter ‘V’ follows a clip name, and is succeeded by a pair of digits, you’ve found a video file. Then, the command to play it is:<\/p>\n The trick is the “ And now you can see your pictures. They’ll play with the VBI data included, and the colour range may appear washed out because you’re displaying broadcast-level pictures on a computer-level display.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You may have found an old Avid drive containing MXF or OMF files compressed with Meridien codecs. Sometimes these are known by their compression ratio, e.g. “2:1” or “14:1”. Because of the combination of the MXF\/OMF container and the Meridien codec, rarely found in modern software apart from Avid, these files can be difficult to … Continue reading Play Avid Meridien MXF or OMF with FFplay<\/span> CLIPnameVnn.<ID>_<ID>.mxf<\/code><\/p>\nID<\/code>” is a hexadecimal string that Avid uses to track the media. The pattern for OMF files is similar.<\/p>\nffplay -f mjpeg CLIPV01.<ID>_<ID>.MXF<\/code><\/p>\n-f mjpeg<\/code>” in the command line. This forces FFplay to interpret the file as containing data encoded as Motion JPEG.<\/p>\n