[FFmpeg-devel] TR-03 implementation

[Éloi Bail]

Hi all, 

Media broadcasters tend to move on carriage of live professional media 
over IP. A group has been set up to recommend a standard for that, and 
they produced the TR-03. It is only a recommendation, but it should be 
close enough to what the SMPTE will adopt to start working on it. 

Radio Canada/CBC, a major Canadian broadcaster, wants to make FFmpeg 
compatible with TR-03 and SMTPE future standard. 

Video pixel format is defined in RFC4175 (4.3. Payload Data) for YCbCr 
format video. According to the discussion we had on #ffmpeg-devel 
yesterday, lots of those pixel formats are not supported in FFmpeg. 
These pixel formats are designed to group together all the samples of a 
pixel group. 

A solution would be to repack the samples into a compatible format, eg. 
planar. Repacking samples seems not to be an appropriate solution 
because it has an impact on performance, specially dealing with high 
resolution uncompressed streams. 

We would like to contribute to FFmpeg by adding the support of those pixel 
formats and thus make FFmpeg usable for the next generation of 
broadcasting products. 

Could you tell us if our contribution would make sense and eventually 
advise us on the best way to address that ? 

Best, 

Eloi 

[1] http://www.videoservicesforum.org/download/technical_recommendations/VSF_TR-03_DRAFT_2015-10-19.pdf 
[2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4175