DASH — Intentionally Corrupt: Malformed ISO 8601 Duration
An intentionally corrupt DASH manifest whose mediaPresentationDuration is the bare number 14.0 instead of the ISO 8601 form PT14.0S. The XML is well-formed, so it parses cleanly and only fails at schema validation — which most players skip. The usual result is a duration of zero or NaN and a seek bar that never populates, with no error anywhere.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<MPD xmlns="urn:mpeg:dash:schema:mpd:2011" profiles="urn:mpeg:dash:profile:isoff-live:2011"
type="static" mediaPresentationDuration="14.0" minBufferTime="PT4.0S">
<Period id="1">
<AdaptationSet mimeType="video/mp4">
<SegmentTemplate timescale="1000" duration="4000" initialization="init.mp4" media="seg-$Number$.m4s"/>
<Representation id="360p" codecs="avc1.4d401e" width="640" height="360" bandwidth="700000"/>
</AdaptationSet>
</Period>
</MPD>
Specifications
- Corruption
- mediaPresentationDuration="14.0" is not an ISO 8601 duration
- Expected
- PT14.0S
- Well Formed Xml
- yes
- Schema Valid
- no
What is a .mpd file?
MPD (Media Presentation Description, .mpd) is the XML manifest at the heart of MPEG-DASH adaptive streaming. It describes periods, adaptation sets, representations, and segment templates, telling a player which bitrate ladders exist and how to construct segment URLs. It is the DASH counterpart to an HLS .m3u8 playlist.
How to use this file
Use an example .mpd to test DASH players, manifest parsers, and ABR ladder logic. Files under /files/stream/ are served inline with permissive CORS, so a player can fetch this manifest and its segments from any origin without re-hosting them.
How to use this file for testing
“DASH — Intentionally Corrupt: Malformed ISO 8601 Duration” is a deterministic Novus Examples fixture for Streaming manifests, Video QA. HLS playlists and DASH MPDs covering multi-bitrate ladders, byte-range addressing, and segment templates. Served inline with permissive CORS under /files/stream/, so a player can load them from any origin without re-hosting.
Documented properties for this file: MPD · 514 bytes. Compare results against paired or grouped companions on this page when present (clean↔damaged, searchable↔scanned, or format twins) so scores stay reproducible across runs.
Download the file once, keep the path stable in CI or local scripts, and treat the spec table as the contract: dimensions, seeds, field lists, and roles are intentional. Corrupt or invalid samples are labelled as such — expect parsers to fail loudly rather than silently accept them.
Media fixtures are short and synthetic by design. Prefer waveform or transcript ground truth in the same group when measuring ASR, trim, upscale, or sync tools; do not assume broadcast-quality masters.
Code examples
# manifests resolve their own segments, so pass the URL, not a local copy
ffprobe -v error -show_entries stream=codec_name,width,height bad-duration.mpd
ffplay bad-duration.mpdRelated files
- mpdDASH — Dynamic (Live) Manifest With a Time-Shift BufferA live DASH manifest: type is dynamic, there is no total duration, and the client must compute which segment is currently available from availabilityStartTime, the wall clock, and the segment duration. Declares a one-minute time-shift buffer and an eight-second presentation delay. The timestamps are fixed so the fixture stays deterministic — a real client will compute a segment number far in the future, which is itself a useful edge case to handle gracefully.
- mpdDASH — Explicit SegmentList AddressingThe same content addressed with an explicit SegmentList — every segment URL enumerated rather than derived from a template. Verbose, but it is what older packagers emit and it permits non-uniform segment naming. A DASH client must support both this and SegmentTemplate; the paired template manifest in this group is the direct contrast.
- mpdDASH — Multi-Period Manifest With a Mid-Roll BreakThree DASH periods — content, an ad break, then content again — each with its own initialisation segment. Period boundaries are where players most often break: the decoder must be reset, the buffer cannot span the discontinuity, and rendition selection restarts. Pairs with the VMAP and SCTE-35 fixtures, which describe the same break from the ad-signalling side.
- mpdDASH — Static MPD With a Segment TemplateA DASH manifest with separate video and audio adaptation sets, three video representations, and $RepresentationID$/$Number$ segment-template addressing — the standard VOD packaging shape. Served inline as application/dash+xml with permissive CORS, so dash.js can load it cross-origin. A manifest-parsing fixture: it describes segment URLs rather than shipping the segments.
- m4sDASH VOD — Init Segment (init-stream0.m4s)A DASH initialisation segment carrying codec configuration for one representation. Named by the manifest's $RepresentationID$ template, so this file also exercises whether a client resolves template variables correctly rather than pattern-matching filenames.
- m4sDASH VOD — Init Segment (init-stream1.m4s)A DASH initialisation segment carrying codec configuration for one representation. Named by the manifest's $RepresentationID$ template, so this file also exercises whether a client resolves template variables correctly rather than pattern-matching filenames.
Generated by generation/video_timedtext.py. Free for any use, no attribution required — license.