The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) 2034 AXF Working Group has submitted its final draft of the Archive eXchange Format (AXF) open-archiving technology specification for review – the final step before balloting to become an official SMPTE standard.

Work on the format began at 2011 NAB Show, when Front Porch Digital CTO Brian Campanotti announced that his team had completed the design and development of AXF based on the original SMPTE Working Group concept and agreed to contribute the company’s specification back to SMPTE. This work forms the basis for the specification currently making its way through the standardisation process.

‘This represents the culmination of years of work and dedication to the invention, development and deployment of AXF,’ says Campanotti. ‘As a founding member of the SMPTE AXF Working Group, Front Porch Digital has been a driving force behind AXF since its inception.’

AXF supports interoperability between digital content storage systems to ensure long-term availability regardless of developments in technology or applications. AXF also acts as a content carrier for network-based transfer of file-based content between systems, an important consideration for cloud-based applications.

‘The submission of the AXF specification for its review comes at a time when other approaches continue to fragment the market, which makes is difficult for content owners to make decisions regarding long-term storage, archive, and preservation,’ Campanotti says. ‘For example, the Linear Tape File System (LTFS), endorsed by a number of manufacturers, is often referred to as a standard although it is nothing more than a set of open-source tools that each has customised for various proprietary applications.’

AXF includes all of the functionality of LTFS, overcomes its well-known limitations (lack of spanning support, capacity constraints, applicability to data-tape only) and adds resiliency and preservation characteristics such as encapsulation, provenance metadata and fixity. AXF is a universal, IT-centric format that applies to all current and future storage technologies, including data tape, spinning disk, flash media, optical, and others, and is focused on the protection, transport, and preservation of any type, number, and size of files – not only media files.