File Types

  • Updated

This article is meant to cover a combination of two things; a comprehensive list of the image and video file types that are supported by Alegion Platform for annotation as well as an overview of some of the file types that may be generated by the Alegion Platform and the best ways to manage them.

Supported File Types for Annotation

One of the advantages of annotating your videos with the Alegion platform is that it was designed from the ground up to handle video data. Playback is faster and smoother than systems that break videos into frames, and pre-processing video is typically not required.

Image Annotation

The Alegion platform supports the following image file types for image annotation:

  • TIF
  • PJP
  • XBM
  • JXL
  • SVGZ
  • JPG
  • JPEG
  • ICO
  • TIFF
  • GIF
  • SVG
  • JFIF
  • WEBP
  • PNG
  • BMP
  • PJPEG
  • AVIF

Video Annotation

The following formats are supported via native playback and require no modification before annotation. Additional formats are supported through automated conversion and validation. See the next paragraph for more information.

  • MP4
  • MOV
  • WEBM

In addition to the format, video files must also meet a few basic requirements:

  • Be playable in a web browser (compatible with the HTML 5 player)
  • Have a constant frame rate (variable frame rates are not supported)
  • Have no missing frames
  • Have no excessive decoding errors

In addition to formats that can be annotated directly, the Alegion Video Validator can analyze and convert a wider variety of files to .MP4 to make them suitable for annotation. Once converted, the annotation results will be accurate to the new reference file produced by the conversion.

If you have a video file type that is not in the list above, run the Alegion Video Validator to determine if your files can be converted to a compatible file. If you have any questions about using the validator or the validator results, contact Alegion support. 

 

Notes & Recommendations: 

Sometimes files that are in compatible formats are still not compatible with browser playback. Non-standard encoding techniques, file corruption, and other anomalies can cause playback failure or loss of frame accuracy when annotating. 

Additionally, a video may fail if it was originally in an unsupported format (e.g. AVI) and was re-wrapped without being re-encoded into a supported format.

Therefore, it is always best to run the Alegion Video Validator to determine if your assets meet these requirements. The validator will flag files with compatibility issues, and provide remediation commands to produce compatible files.

In addition to using the validator, if your assets do not meet these requirements Alegion offers video pre-processing services to ensure the assets meet the platform requirements. This service can be discussed with your Customer Success Manager and may be charged as a professional service.

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