From osmf.adobe

Overview

The Flash Media Manifest is a file format that contains information about a Flash media asset. This information includes the location of the media, DRM authentication information, media bootstrap information, multi-bitrate information (MBR), etc. The intended workflow is that a media player loads and "plays" a manifest file as if it were an atomic media file. The load process might involve DRM authentication, HTTP bootstrapping, and selection of the appropriate MBR rendition.

The manifest file itself is an XML document that represents a single piece of media, for example, a music video. That music video might have multiple variations (e.g. related instances of the video with different bit rates, localized content, etc.), but a single manifest file would never encapsulate more than that one music video. To represent more than one distinct piece of media (for example, an entire album of music videos) requires multiple manifests or the use of other encapsulation formats (such as SMIL or RSS/Atom).

A manifest file can include metadata, DRM settings, and/or bootstrap information, and each can be assigned to the piece of media as a whole (that is, to all instances of the media), or to a specific instance. In the former case, the information is placed under the root of the manifest, while in the latter case the information is placed directly under the representation to which it applies.

This document describes the structure of the F4M file format, which is currently at version 2.0. It is published as an open specification.

Terminology

Manifest File

An instance of a file of this format.

F4M

The file extension for a file of this format.

DRM

Digital Rights Management, as implemented in Flash Player v10.1.

MLM

Multi-level manifest, a concept introduced in F4M 2.0 to provide support for manifest file hierarchies.

Set-Level Manifest

A manifest file that groups individual stream-level manifest files.

Stream-Level Manifest

A manifest file describing a single <media> instance.

OBSOLETE INFORMATION, TAKEN DOWN

The new location of this file is: TBD