MXF Player for Windows on GPU
Updated:
Fastvideo MXF Player plays MXF files with JPEG2000 compression in real time on the GPU, where CPU players such as VLC or Windows Media Player struggle even at 2K. It decodes on CUDA and handles 2K at 60 fps, 10-bit from SSD, on 64-bit Windows.
Working with a different JPEG2000 format? Use the FastDCP Player for full DCP packages (DCI 2K/4K digital cinema), the Fast J2K Player for .jp2 / .j2k / .jpx frames and image sequences, or the Fast J2K Viewer for still and geospatial (GMLJP2) JPEG2000 images. This page covers MXF files with JPEG2000 (J2K) essence.
MXF is an abbreviation for Material Exchange Format, which is a container format for professional digital video and audio media defined by a set of standards from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). MXF is a file format for the exchange of material between servers, tape streamers and digital archives.
MXF file is usually a storage for video and audio at DCP packages. In that case internal compression of frames is done according to JPEG2000 Standard and this is the reason why we can't play MXF file on conventional media players. To use VLC, we need to convert MXF to MP4 at first and then play MP4 instead on MXF.
MXF player is based on Fastvideo Image & Video Processing SDK and it could be downloaded from our download page. The software can work with one or two GPUs to offer real-time MXF (J2K) processing with smooth output. The first GPU is utilized for MXF decoding and it should be NVIDIA GPU, though the second GPU which is intended for video output, could be from Intel, NVIDIA or AMD. That two-GPU configuration is the best choice to offer the fastest solution for rendering and output in real-time. JPEG2000 decoding algorithm is computationally intensive, so we need help from the second GPU to output decoded data to the monitor, because NVIDIA GPU is not able to output images to the monitor during J2K decoding.
That application can also play MXF with just one NVIDIA GPU both for rendering and output. This is actually not a problem for 2K resolution, though for 12-bit footage at 4K it could be not enough.
Key Features of Fastvideo MXF Player
- Input file extension is MXF for audio and video
- Audio is a 24-bit linear PCM uncompressed multichannel WAV
- The Picture Track File essence is compressed using JPEG2000
- JPEG2000 batch decoding on GPU for grayscale and color video streams
- Irreversible (wavelet CDF 9/7) and reversible (wavelet CDF 5/3) decoding modes
- Bit depth: 8–12 bits per channel
- Number of decomposition levels: 1–7
- Code-block size 16×16, 32×32 or 64×64
- Option for arbitrary size of codeblock
- Chroma subsampling modes: 4:4:4, 4:2:2
- Color spaces: XYZ, Linear, sRGB, Rec.709, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB
- MXF input from HDD/RAID/SSD or CPU/GPU memory
- Workflow for MXF processing on CPU and GPU:
- MXF reading and frame extraction
- Frame parsing
- Packet Decoding
- Entropy Decoding
- Inverse Quantization
- IDWT
- Inverse Color Transform and DC-level shifting
- Output formatting
- Final resize to output window resolution
- Output colorspace and gamma transforms
- Data output: uncompressed resized image at CPU or GPU memory
- Integration with OpenGL to ensure smooth playback
- Options: video scaling, rotation, multi GPU support, etc.
- MXF player is compatible with 64-bit Windows-10/11
Performance benchmarks for 12-bit, 4K MXF video decoding and rendering
How fast can you play 4K MXF JPEG2000 video?
- 120 fps smooth playback on MXF Player for Windows on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
- More than 200 fps conversion rate to JPG/PPM/TIFF on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
Roadmap for MXF Player from Fastvideo
- MXF Player for Windows with smooth playback - done
- MXF converter - done
- FFmpeg codec for MXF (J2K) encoding and decoding on GPU at multithreaded batch mode - done
Links for MXF (J2K) downloads
- Download MXF file (12-bit, J2K) for testing - 2K MXF (J2K) SNOWMAN-DCP3D.rar
- 4K DCP 4096×2160 (14 GB, Digital Cinema Package)
- Download MXF Player on the GPU for Windows (CUDA-12.6)
- Source codes for our MXF Player for Windows are available upor request.
About the author
Fyodor Serzhenko, PhD, is the founder and CEO of Fastvideo. He earned his PhD at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 1993. Since 2009 he has led the development of Fastvideo’s GPU-accelerated image codecs and ISP modules, including the Fastvideo SDK. Connect on LinkedIn.
Why you can trust these results
Fastvideo has built GPU-accelerated image processing software since 2009. Our codecs comply with the standards they implement — JPEG (ITU-T T.81 / ISO IEC 10918) and JPEG2000 (ITU-T T.800 / ISO IEC 15444) — and our tools are open source on GitHub. Every performance figure we publish is reproducible: see our benchmark methodology, download the Fastvideo SDK benchmark report (PDF), and measure it on your own GPU.