Community Review: BEP047 - Audio/video recordings for behavioral experiments

[scott-huberty]

Note

This discussion will stay locked until 12:01 AM EST (UTC-5) on Monday, November 2, 2026 (05:01 UTC), when the review period opens.

We are pleased to announce the community review period for BIDS Extension Proposal (BEP) 047! We have developed this extension to support audio, video, combined audio-video, and still-image recordings of behaving subjects.

BEP047 extends the BIDS standard to allow these recordings in the beh/ directory using the new _audio, _video, _audiovideo, and _image suffixes. Sidecar JSON files describe each recording (device, duration, codecs, frame rate, resolution). Simultaneous cameras or microphones are told apart with the recording entity, and repeated captures with run. BEP047 also adds a shared Media Files appendix that defines common formats, codecs, and stream metadata. Other proposals that handle media, such as BEP044 (stimuli), can reuse it.

• The draft specification may be found here, with the most significant changes in the behavioral recordings section and the media files appendix.
• The proposed changes may be found at the bids-specification PR #2231. To view the source difference, click the Files changed tab.
• Example datasets are being proposed here, which are at this link:
  • beh_audio_video_recordings
• No changes were needed to the validator.

Procedure

Review period

Community review is open from November 2 - November 13, 2026.

Voting

This discussion is a poll, which you can vote in once and cannot change your response. Therefore, please vote once you are satisfied that your answer will not change.

If you vote "No", you may create a thread to explain your reasoning or send a private email to bids.maintenance [at] gmail.com so that your position can be fully understood.

How to review

Use threads in this discussion to request clarification or changes to the BEP. Each independent topic or proposed change should have its own thread. Please review existing threads and consider adding comments to those, if your topics are already being discussed. If your concerns are adequately represented by an existing comment or comments, consider using the 👍🏻 reaction button to indicate agreement in place of extending the discussion.

Where possible, propose the specific text you would like to see added or removed.

For minor issues, such as typos, feel free to make code suggestions only, using the suggest feature on the BEP047 pull request. These suggestions may be accepted or rejected without discussion, so do not make substantial proposals in this way.

Finalization

Once the review period is finished, the BEP leads and maintainers will consider the entire discussion, identify outstanding points to be resolved, and work toward finalizing the BEP. Community members may be asked to participate in this process to provide the necessary expertise.

Before being merged, the BEP will be integrated into the BIDS validator, and the examples must pass the validator.

A BIDS standard version v1.12 release is anticipated in January 2027, regardless of the conclusion of this specific BEP.

If, for any reason, a critical issue is found after the BEP is merged, the BEP will be reverted while the issues are addressed. At the discretion of the BIDS steering group and maintainers group, depending on the scope of changes, a new community review period may be opened.

[Alexandros-Christou]

Could the example dataset include two recordings with a known fractional-second start offset, plus an event worked through in both timelines? The inspected sub-02 Stroop entries in scans.tsv all start at 11:00:00.

For example, if the face recording starts 0.2 s after the first recording of the run, an event at run time 1.2 s corresponds to 1.0 s in the face recording. This would illustrate the existing shared-run-timeline rule without introducing another timing field.

I have checked the draft timing text and the example metadata; I haven't run the validator or decoded the placeholder media.