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Welcome to the Homepage of MCF, the new, open Audio/Video container format!

MCF is a challenging project, aiming to become the standard of Multimedia Container Formats one day. It is essential to first clarify in this context, what an Audio/Video container is exactly:
MCF is not a video compression format, nor can it be used to compress music or pictures like MP3 or JPEG, as it is not a codec (short for (en)coder - decoder)! It is more like the envelope around several audio, video and subtitle streams, allowing the user to store a complete movie in one single MCF file thats easy to handle, and making sure the audio and video can be played in Mediaplayers on PCs or standalone units in your living room, in perfect sync and with all the comfort you may expect from a modern container format, like:

- menus
- chapter entries
- selectable subtitle streams
- selectable audio streams
- fast seeking in the file
- high error recovery
- streamable over internet

MCF is an open standards project, meaning that it's absolutely free to use and the technical specifications describing the bitstream are open to everybody, even to companies that would like to support MCF in their products using a selfmade, closed source implementation. However, a special 'MCF specification license', to be released in written form together with the final version of it, will describe exactly how it may be used in such cases. For more details visit the 'License' subpage here (available soon). The sourcecode of all the libraries developed by the MCF developement team are all licensed under a BSD style license, to allow almost unrestricted use.

The MCF project is working in close cooperation with Alex 'Foogod' Stewart, the founder of UCI, the new openstandard codec interfacing API, aiming to replace the VfW API and to lay the foundation of a standardized codec interfacing API for Unix/Linux.

The founders of MCF have the following goals :

- create and document a modern, flexible, x-platform compatible Audio/Video container format
- establish MCF as the opensource alternative to existing containers such as AVI (Audio-Video Interleave), ASF (Advanced Streaming Format), MOV (Quicktime), RM (RealMedia), MP4 (MPEG-4 container), and MPEG (MPEG-1/2 container)
- introduce UCI as the open source alternative to the outdated VfW API (Video for Windows)
- develop a set of tools for the creation, editing and implementation of MCF files, under a GNU GPL license
- develop libraries and tools for software developers to be able to support MCF in their applications
- prepare hardware support of MCF files in next generation standalone units, in close cooperation with device manufacturers
- support adaption and implementation of MCF libraries into OpenBeOS Mediakit and GStreamer (Multimedia Framework for Linux , equivalent to Microsoft® DirectShow™ for Windows™)
- help codec developers (both opensource and closed source) to support the UCI API for direct MCF support in their products, also to create transors/wrappers for existing proprietary or closed source codecs
- launch a set of DirectShow filters for playback and creation of MCF files on Windows™ Operating Systems

We invite every interested developer to join our team and to help us achieve these goals. While most of the existing MCF code is in C++ we are also interested in C and Java programmers joining us.