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Video Formats That Will Be Usable in 25 years?

Posted by Cliff on from the sometimes-analog-is-better-than-digital dept.

El_Nofx asks: "I have several home videos and hundreds of video clips stored in dozens of CODECs that I want to consolidate into one format so 10-15 years from now I can show them to my children. One in particular I don't want to loose is a video of 9-11 put out in Shockwave Flash. Has anyone thought of a better way to do this, as opposed to convert them all to full-frame AVI. Is there a CODEC out there that in 10 years will still be backward compatible enough to play those old clips. There seems to be a lot of buzz around about doing everything digitally with regards to pictures, movies, etc. But what use is it if 15 years from now you can't find anyway to watch them. What really bothers me is the CPRM movement. If not done correctly, that could negate the work all of us have done to digitize video. Any thoughts?" Open Formats and CODECs will beat any proprietary format for this exact problem, and with that usual twist of computing irony, these are the formats that are least used when dealing with multimedia. Many people cite better compression with closed formats as their main reason for using them, but when the CODECs are obsoleted, they'll be then feeling the crunch. For now, consider dumping your digital videos to VCD or DVD, as these should be viewable on the consumer level players which exist. For those looking for a more economical route: VHS/Beta is also an option. Proprietary digital formats, especially the bleeding edge formats involving high compression CODECs, should be avoided at all costs.

2 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. MPEG-2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    An open source CODEC such as VP3 is possible and because it's well documented there's safety there. But if you're not willing to accept that you may need to write it yourself, or pay someone to, then also recognise that there's safety in numbers.

    So I'd go with MPEG-2. It's a well supported standard on many platforms. Also, you have the benefit that almost all DVD players these days can play VCD disks and MPEG2 > VCD is an easy step.

    It's easy enough to write VCD disks with any CDR writer, too.

  2. Lots and Lots of TIFFs by Wanker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Scary, but true. ;-)

    If you want maximum compatibility nothing is going to beat a huge sequence of still frames stored in a commonly-used format. Almost any of the common Internet standard formats would work. JPEG is probably the best choice for video still frames since it will save you a bunch of storage.

    Burn them onto ISO 9660 CD-R media, and you'll have something that stands an excellent chance of being viewable in 30 years.

    If you simply *must* use a video format, MPEG-2 or MPEG-1 is probably your best bet. Enough people use MPEG-2 commercially to ensure that the format is not likely to be completely abandoned. You can also find current Open Source decoders for MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.

    Burn the source code onto your CD-ROMs along with the image stream and you should be in reasonably good shape. Tar/gzip is probably a safe choice, though if you're really concerned, you should burn it onto the CDs untarred and uncompressed.