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MXF+JPEG-2000+HDD = Future of Video Preservation?
Anonymous Archivist writes "Media Matters, a technical consultancy specializing in archival audio and video material, recently completed a Mellon Foundation funded Digital Video Reformatting Preservation Project for the Dance Heritage Coalition. They conclude that MXF is the recommended container format, JPEG-2000 is the recommended encoding format and HDD is the recommended storage media. It's a very valuable series of experiments and offers a strong indication of where the archival preservation of analogue video is heading."
OK, let's talk archiveability. Let's talk about a medium that you can leave in a shoebox for a hundred years and read just by shining a light through it. I'm not talking hypothetical here - this technology is proven by the fact that people used it a hundred years ago and it worked. And the technology is even better now, even more stable.
I am of course talking about film. It is very very easy now to write digital images onto film, not very much more difficult than it is to scan film. There's no need to worry about whether the file format will be supported in the future, as I've already said. You don't need to shovel money into vendor's pockets every few years just to copy it to the latest trendiest type of disc. You can build a machine to project film out of junk if you need to, or you can scan it if you want a digital image and when you have a better scanner (e.g. a higher DMax), you can just scan it again.
The dude who wrote this report is just blowing smoke. He's trying to sell snake oil.
It would be smarter to use PAR2 (or similar) on a filesystem basis, than to use a RAID filesystem. It's easier to deal with user space programs for reconstructing data.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Definitely not!
Most if not all peer to peer networks require a certain level of interest in an item for it to be retained. Popular items are always easy to find while obscure / old items gradually disappear from the network.
Try finding a movie that's a few years old. You'll have more trouble finding the original Jurassic Park than Jurassic Park III.
Peer to peer is not a great way to reliably and systematically preserve cultural heritage.