VALIDATION.md

Validation Report

Scope

The current post-v0.3 main-branch candidate validates:

• all 356 canonical Standard rows and direct Standard MP4 paths
• all 129 active Pre-Standard rows and direct Pre-Standard MP4 paths
• persistent record identity and cross-tier uniqueness
• exact Hub Xet file IDs and stored byte sizes
• container-header technical metadata for every active published MP4
• repository membership, filename rules, field types, numeric ranges, and stored-orientation consistency

One 6,587,685,497-byte provenance object is promoted to the canonical root, and the distinct 496,296,535-byte object previously occupying its corrected name is moved to its curator-confirmed April 4 path. No video bytes are transcoded, replaced, downloaded in full, or newly uploaded. The promoted object's properties were read from its public MP4 header using HTTP range requests. Sizes and content identities were read from the Hub repository inventory.

The later Standard ingestion adds 17 creator-verified media objects totaling 9,289,459,921 bytes. Every addition was fully decoded before upload, all 17 local SHA-256 identities are unique, and none matches an existing Hub media object. The batch is indexed without changing the 29-field schema.

Result

PASS — zero structural validation errors

Check	Result
Active indexed rows	485
Canonical Standard rows	356
Pre-Standard rows	129
Metadata columns per index	29
Unique persistent record_id values	485
Unique nonblank content hashes	485
Complete encoded-video metadata	485/485
Canonical repository paths matched	356/356
Pre-Standard repository paths matched	129/129
Stored-orientation conflicts	0
Duplicate active content hashes	0

Both Hub builder configurations explicitly declare the same 29 features. This prevents per-CSV inference from representing an integer-only canonical encoded_frame_rate column as int64 while representing historical fractional rates as float64 in the Pre-Standard configuration.

Audited statistics

• Total indexed playback duration: 50.49 hours
• Canonical playback duration: 40.89 hours
• Pre-Standard playback duration: 9.60 hours
• Median active-record playback duration: 329.630 seconds
• Total indexed video size: 1.901 TB decimal
• Stored orientation: 473 portrait, 12 landscape
• Audio streams: 479 present, 6 absent
• Unknown finish dates: 9
• Unknown finish times: 62

Outstanding warnings

1. Fifteen canonical 30×40 records use support = Paper, while Archive_Specifications.md describes the 30×40 support as Illustration Board. The curator must determine whether the rows or the specification are wrong; this release candidate does not manufacture a correction.
2. Two creator-confirmed Standard additions are shortened derivatives rather than full-duration masters. Their start/end limitations remain explicit in notes; neither is represented as a complete capture lineage.
3. The 2026-01-11 and 2026-02-08 additions each produced one non-monotonic duplicate video-timestamp warning during validation but decoded completely. The 2026-01-11 recording also has pronounced lighting variation.
4. Five Pre-Standard records retain time = 00:00 while their finish date is unknown. Confirm whether those are documented midnight times or historical placeholders before normalizing them.
5. Two Pre-Standard records retain incomplete material fields because the filename evidence is insufficient or ambiguous.
6. Most masters retain an audio stream. Stream presence does not establish meaningful signal, and rights/privacy review remains necessary.
7. Encoded frame rate is playback rate and cannot be used as original drawing-time sampling.
8. The 2012–2016 layer has no public video payload at this snapshot.
9. Separate Hub configurations prevent tier mixing, but no leakage-safe train/validation/test partition has been defined.

Reproduction

Validate both active indexes:

python tools/validate_metadata.py metadata.csv \
  --pre-standard-metadata Pre_Standard_Time_Lapses/metadata.csv

For the strongest repository-inventory check, first augment the pinned Hub API JSON with the Xet file IDs returned by the same revision's resolve headers:

python tools/capture_hub_inventory.py \
  --repo-json repo_api_blobs.json \
  --revision "<revision-under-review>" \
  --output repo_inventory_xet.json

Then validate paths, Xet identities, and exact byte sizes together:

python tools/validate_metadata.py metadata.csv \
  --pre-standard-metadata Pre_Standard_Time_Lapses/metadata.csv \
  --repo-inventory-json repo_inventory_xet.json

A plain JSON list of repository paths is also accepted through the legacy --repo-files-json spelling, but that checks membership only; it cannot independently verify hashes or byte sizes.

Use --viewer-json only with a Viewer snapshot produced from the same repository revision and configuration under review.

The Pre-Standard technical enrichment is reproducible from a pinned Hub API response containing siblings with LFS metadata and an FFmpeg executable:

python tools/enrich_prestandard.py \
  --metadata Pre_Standard_Time_Lapses/metadata.csv \
  --repo-json repo_inventory_xet.json \
  --revision "<revision-under-review>" \
  --ffmpeg /path/to/ffmpeg \
  --cache prestandard_probe_cache.json \
  --output Pre_Standard_Time_Lapses/metadata.csv

The revision is intentionally explicit: reproducing against a moving branch would weaken both identity and technical-metadata claims.

The canonical v0.2 index remains reproducible from its pinned 335-row source plus the three audited additions:

python tools/repair_metadata.py source_metadata.csv metadata.csv \
  --additions tools/metadata_additions_v0.2.csv