DC 5.8 Video and audio media formats

General settings

As with Image formats, Video and audio formats are controlled through the DAM Center backend under System tools → Formats.

The details view for formats are the same regardless of format type (i.e. Image, Video, etc) and therefore it is important to understand what is relevant for the given type.

For video and audio formats the following fields are important

Format type
Format Xml
All the properties (i.e. Width, Height, bitrate etc.)
Profile XML

The latter property is introduced with 5.8.0 and replaces Encoder profile. This property can only be edited through API and configuration management. There will be UI for this property in the future.

Profile XML

The profile XML is what defines the video format and similar to ImageMagick it is the FFMPeg command used to transcode the format.

An example of Profile XML looks as follows

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<tns:FFMPegJobProfile xmlns:tns="http://documentation.digizuite.dk/schemas/digibatch/FFMPegJobProfile.xsd" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://documentation.digizuite.dk/schemas/digibatch/FFMPegJobProfile.xsd D:\\Work\\DigiBatch\\Packages\\DigiFFMpegJobs\\FFMPegJobProfile.xsd">
	<tns:PassSetting>
		<tns:cmdline>-i %infile% -vcodec libx264 -aspect %aspect% -s %videosize% -vb %videobitrate% -vprofile main -level 3.0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -sn -acodec aac -strict -2 -ac %audiochannels% -ar %asamplingrate% -ab %audiobitrate% -y %outfile%</tns:cmdline>
	</tns:PassSetting>
</tns:FFMPegJobProfile>

The main reason for not using the same Settings input field is that transcoded videos is much more complex and one command can contain multiple video transcodes to enhance the video quality.

The approach is very similar to how the Settings field is used for images, where the difference is that the replace tags are used more.

The replace tags are populated with the values of the properties on the Media format (e.g. Width, height, bitrate etc.)

It is out of the scope of this documentation to explain FFMPeg and therefore we refer to the official documentation.

Format XML

The format XML is used to parse asset metadata to the transcode. An example looks as follows

<mediaformat>
	<fieldmapping active="1" asset_metafieldid="50129" jobident="AspectRatio">
		<defaultvalue>169</defaultvalue>
	</fieldmapping>
	<fieldmapping active="1" asset_metafieldid="50129" jobident="VideoRotate">
		<defaultvalue>0</defaultvalue>
	</fieldmapping>
</mediaformat>

Where in this case information about rotation and aspect ratio is parsed along to the video format. This is used to overwrite the default inputs of the asset source file.