which media player plays the native mxf's?

Z

zdoe

Member
just wetting my toes with hvx. got the first editing project shot with it 720/24pN on my avid media composer, and about to do a two day shoot for another job with it next weekend...

first / foremost - which media player, if any can play back the footage straight off the hard drive with a double click? - i've got most that i know of installed in my system (media player classic, kMPlayer, VLan Player), but none seem to be able to handle it. & avid let's me import the footage so i DO have a codec installed as well. or am i out of luck and just asking too much?

yes, i've spent the better part of a week googling around for answers to various mxf-related questions...
 
If you associate MXF files with Windows Media Player, it will play MXF files.

However, you need to have P2 Viewer installed, and since audio isn't part of the MXF files, you will only get video. Of course, if P2 Viewer is installed, you can also play the files using that, even full-screen.
 
media player prob solved - it seems i had broken codec on the computah

media player prob solved - it seems i had broken codec on the computah

yes, i'm on winXP.

THoff said:
If you associate MXF files with Windows Media Player, it will play MXF files.
Click to expand...

so now they DO play. my system crashed & after a reboot i did some registry cleaning. the problem seems to have vanished, now at least kMplayer & media player classic play the 720/24p MXFs with no problem (except most the footage is upside down - courtesy the 35mm lens adapter). i guess there was a broken codec somewhere.

THoff said:
However, you need to have P2 Viewer installed, and since audio isn't part of the MXF files, you will only get video. Of course, if P2 Viewer is installed, you can also play the files using that, even full-screen.
Click to expand...


i do have the p2 viewer installed (finally found one in china, the web is full of dead links to it...). can't seem to figure out how to use it though. do i need to recreate the p2 card's directory structure / metadata xml's to be able to open a single MXF with it?

and most importantly - what do you guys do to get the audio to play with the picture? do i need to transcode to wav? if, which app works - procoder 3 for example doesn't seem to like these files?

cheers!
 
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P2 Viewer can be downloaded from Panasonic's P2 support desk website:

http://panasonic.biz/sav/p2/index.html

And yes, P2 Viewer expects you to maintain the directory structure and file names as the camera recorded them. If you rename anything or don't copy all the files, all bets are off.

The audio is uncompressed PCM.
 
thanks for the link. now i got the new version.

ok - will play around with the p2 player a bit more. but working on avid the media needs to be in avid's directory structure and therefore a player that plays a-file-on-its-own is better.

media player classic plays the audio if i double click it, but it does not seem to be able to pick it up and play it with the video in sync - something that it DOES do when accessing .m2v / .wav files with the same name.

anybody have a working solution of a player/workflow that would just play, no questions asked, both video(full screen) & audio?
 
In P2 Viewer you can create virtual P2 cards ("Set Virtual P2 Card" on the Tools menu) that map to arbitrary locations on your hard drive, but that only works if the P2 structure is maintained.

I'm not sure what Avid does when it logs and imports P2 media, but if it keeps the file names and logical directory structure, you should be able to set up a virtual P2 card and play the video with audio in P2 Viewer.

There's also the P2 Contents Management System (P2CMS), which is also a free download from Panasonic's site. It has more features than P2 Viewer and is available for both windows and the Mac, but I haven't played with it much, so I can't tell you if it can overcome the limitations of P2 Viewer.
 
avid wants all the files, both video and audio, in a directory path x:\avid mediafiles\mxf\1 (,2,3 etc.)

so in order to keep the files viewable by the p2viewer, one would have to keep two copies of them, which is feasible for a small project but not for a large one.
 
IMHO, that's Avid's problem -- they are the ones who are altering the organization of the files during the import process.

As I said before, I haven't used P2CMS, but I would check to see if that can accomodate your workflow, you can't be the only one who has run into this issue. You may also want to see if the folks that hang out in the Avid section on this forum have any hints on how to proceed.
 
well, i'm the first to admit that avid is a user-hostile program (but most of the time it does work if you bend its way.) on this instance they're actually ahead of fcp as they don't re-wrap the media. apparently avid does read p2 card media natively if the cards are local & have an assigned drive letter, but how many of those can you have...

in this specific instance i think it's pana who should make a universal viewer available - assuming you just shot a feature with the cam and kept all p2 directories intact, you'd have a directory tree from here to mars - impossible to navigate.
 
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