Introduction

ew-vodingest (ESB3021) reads and ingests an MP4 audio and video + subtitles asset defined by a SMIL file into an ESF (Edgeware Storage Format) asset in a way that is compatible with the DASH OnDemand profile. A corresponding DASH MPD file is generated. The syntax and usage is explained in the SMIL section.

Alternatively, instead of a SMIL file path, a path to a directory containing media files can be specified. In this case, all files with relevant file extensions will be used, but some metadata like subtitle role cannot be specified. For best control of metadata, it is therefore recommended to use a SMIL file.

ESB3021 ew-vodingest is intended as an improvement and replacement for the ESB3005 ew-recorderingest tool. However, at present, ew-vodingest only supports a small subset of the use cases that ew-recorder supports, so the tools need to be used in parallel for some time.

The currently supported codecs are:

video: AVC, HEVC audio: AAC, HE-AACv1, HE-AACv2, AC-3, EC-3 subtitles: WebVTT, TTML, STL, SRT

A main focus of this tool is to ingest VoD content that can be used to generate live content by combining VoD assets using ESB3019 ew-vod2cbm. There is therefore a restriction on the ingested content that it must be possible to discover a common constant GoP duration (sync-frame distance) for all video tracks, and that all sample durations are exactly the same in their respective timescales. The timescales may differ, but only by integer factors, for example 50 for 50Hz video and 25 for 25Hz video.

Directory processing

It is possible to specify a directory of media files without a SMIL file. ew-vodingest will list all files in that directory and extract all files with extensions:

	.mp4 for audio and video
	.ttml, .webvtt, .vtt, .stl, .srt for subtitles

This may be convenient, but gives fewer possibilities to set parameters for the tracks. For subtitles, the language can be automatically extracted from the filename.

Usage

ew-vodingest is a command-line tool that is run as

$ ew-vodingest [options]

  -hls
    	Output HLS playlists (experimental)
  -i string
    	SMIL file or dir defining the asset (mandatory)
  -o string
    	output directory (mandatory)
  -slim
    	Only output content_info and dat files
  -version
    	Get version, date and possible expiration date
  -w int
    	minimal output segment duration in milliseconds (default 4000)
  -y int
    	maximal output segment duration in milliseconds (default 12000)

The -i, -o, -w, -y options are the same as for ESB3005 ew-recorder.