I’ve been working on archiving media for my family, photos that I save as jpegs and films, haven’t gotten will get there.

This got me thinking about the risk of file types getting extinct and unreadable – how should one approach that if the goal is (as long term as possible) archival of data?

I suppose film formats are more vulnerable since algorithms are more complex – but it also feel to me like the common formats are so widly spread that there will always be a way. What are your thoughts?

  • dlarge6510@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Basically you would not expect to have an issue with any very common format that has already been extensively used over decades.

    Jpeg, PNG, tiff for images for example. Mpeg1/2 and 4 (AVC) for video. All have been about for ages and all are widely understood and implemented by FLOSS software.

    However although they are very likely to be usable in the future, they still have some issues with patents etc so there are formats designed to avoid that entirely.

    Several formats were pretty popular in the past, like QuickTime and RealVideo. They are totally dead today (although quicktime apparently survived on Macs). Luckily it’s still possible to play and transcode those.

    AVI is an example for a totally open video codec, with YouTube and Netflix already starting to use it AVI may be the next one on the list. But, even if you use something like AVI society in 40 years time will still have a need for decoding mp4!