# Process Data

Media Server output tasks export the metadata produced by Media Server. This can include information about the ingested video, information about copies of the video that you create through encoding, and any information extracted from the video during analysis.

TIP: Output tasks do not output video. For information about saving video, see Encode Video to a File or UDP Stream

The following diagram shows the steps that occur when you configure Media Server to output data.

## Select Input Records

An output task receives records that are produced by your ingest, analysis, encoding, transform, and ESP tasks. You can choose the information to output by setting the `Input` configuration parameter in the output task. If you do not set this parameter, the output task receives records from all tracks that are considered by default as 'output' tracks. For information about whether a track is considered by default to be an 'output' track, refer to Media Server Reference.

## Combine Records into Documents

An output task receives individual records, but you might want to combine the information from many records and index that information as a single document. For example, if you are processing a news broadcast, you might want to index a document for each news story, rather than a document for each word spoken in the audio and a document for each recognized face. To do this, the Media Server must combine records representing recognized faces, speech-to-text results, recognized objects, and so on.

Most output engines have several indexing modes so that you can configure how to create documents. For more information about these indexing modes, see Choose How to Output Data.

## XSL Transformation

The output task performs an XSL transformation to convert the combined records into a format that is suitable for the destination repository.

Media Server is supplied with XSL templates to transform data into IDOL documents and other formats. You can modify the default templates to suit your needs. Set the `XSLTemplate` configuration parameter in the output task to specify the path of the XSL template to use.

If you want to customize the XSL template, or you need to troubleshoot a problem, set the configuration parameters `SavePreXML=TRUE`, `SavePostXML=TRUE`, and `XMLOutputPath` so that Media Server writes documents to disk before and after performing the transformation. Viewing the data before and after transformation might help you optimize your XSL template. In a production system, Micro Focus recommends setting `SavePreXML` and `SavePostXML` to `FALSE`.

## Send the Data to the External System

After performing the XSL transformation, Media Server sends the data to its destination.

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