THE SHIP TAKES THE DOCK'S SHAPE BEFORE IT SAILS
Every publishing surface has an exact ingest contract — container, codec, ratio, duration. MediaConform probes the source, reshapes it in one encode when it must, passes it through untouched when it can, and then verifies the result instead of trusting the encoder's flags.
THE GATE THAT NEVER JUDGES
The platform's ingest spec is the one detection domain that is purely mechanical — container, codec, GOP, ratio, duration; no judgement anywhere. Its cost when you fail it: the upload fails — immediate, fixable. The other outcome is quieter and worse: a non-conforming file gets re-encoded by the platform, with quality loss you never approved. The docs' severity ladder calls this the one domain where engineering effort reliably pays off, because it is a compliance checklist, not an adversarial problem. MediaConform is that checklist, executed before the platform ever sees the file.
WHAT THE WATER CAN DO
| Capability | Evidence | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Per-surface FFmpeg encode profiles — each surface gets its own recipe | T-064 | LANDED |
| Target surface is required, never defaulted — no silent "probably reels" | T-063 | LANDED |
| Faststart + no-edit-list encode settings baked into every profile | T-065 | LANDED |
| Post-encode verification — the output is re-probed; the encoder's flags are not trusted | T-066 | LANDED |
| Pass-through path for already-compliant sources — no needless re-encode, ever | T-067 | LANDED |
| Thumbnail generation: JPEG, sRGB intent, ≤ 8 MB | T-068 | LANDED |
| Declarative rule engine + the full video / audio / image / duration rule set | T-013 … T-018 | LANDED |
| MP4 box walker: moov-before-mdat and edit-list detection at the byte level | T-020 … T-022 | LANDED |
| Fixture corpus — a pass and a fail case per rule — wired into CI | T-024 … T-026 | LANDED |
| Spec rules validated against real published content, discrepancies logged | T-027 | LANDED |
| sRGB is asserted but unenforced — for published images and thumbnails alike | #187 · #191 | OPEN QUESTION |
| The MPO/JPS exclusion cannot be enforced — ffprobe cannot tell them apart | #190 | OPEN QUESTION |
| The coverage guard conflates escape with coverage | #192 | OPEN QUESTION |
| The verified-ffprobe set can widen without the record widening with it | #188 | OPEN QUESTION |
LANDED MEANS MERGED WITH TESTS IN THE REPOSITORY — NOTHING HERE IS GENERALLY AVAILABLE YET. THE OPEN QUESTIONS ARE LISTED BECAUSE WE DOCUMENT GAPS.
WHAT LANDS WHEN THE DOCK CHANGES SHAPE
MediaConform rides media-pipeline — the stateless deck. No database: same input plus same spec version yields the same artefact, so jobs retry free, scale on CPU, and the whole back catalogue can be re-validated by replaying them. It shares the deck with THE SEAL, which stamps what the water has shaped.
The dock's shape is not negotiable, so the ship is reshaped before it sails — never at the pier, never by the harbourmaster, and never twice.
WHY THE WAVES MOVE BEFORE THE LAUNCH — NOT AFTER THE REJECTION