MPEG DASH for IP-Based Cable Services Part 4: SCTE Common Intermediate Format (CIF/TS)

The purpose of this document is to describe the Common Intermediate Format MPD including its elements, attributes, and values. The CIF MPD or CIF manifest is created from the parsing of an MPEG Transport Stream that is marked up and conditioned for virtual segmentation. A downstream device such as a packager can then use the CIF MPD to request and extract segments that can be modified to support various types of adaptive streaming technologies in the client.

The CIF MPD is used for processing of virtual segmented content streamed for linear services or stored for cDVR and VoD services. The CIF MPD is the DASH-like manifest as described in the reference architecture in Section 7 of SCTE 217. This document is an extension of DASH as constrained by SCTE 214-1, 214-2, and 214-3. The scope of this document is to describe the structure of the CIF MPD. The CIF MPD contains enough information to create client manifest and segment conditioning for the supporting end-client player adaptive streaming technologies.

The Common Intermediate Format (CIF) is based on DASH’s Manifest Presentation Description (MPD) for MPEG-TS profiles, but with some extensions. The CIF MPD is created from parsing ATS or DASH-TS conditioned streams or generated while encoding video files as specified in SCTE 223.