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Ask Slashdot: Video Storage For Time Capsule?
New submitter dwywit, anticipating World Backup Day, writes I've been asked to film this year's ANZAC services in my town. This is a big one, as it's the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign, and dear to our hearts here in Oz. The organisers have asked me to provide a camera-to-projector setup for remote viewing (they're expecting big crowds this year), and a recording of the parade and various services throughout the morning. Copies will go to the local and state library as a record of the day, but they would also like a copy to go into a time capsule. I have two issues to solve: 1. a storage medium capable of lasting 50 or 100 years and still be readable, and 2. a wrapper/codec that will be available and usable when the capsule is opened. I have the feeling that a conversion to film might be the only way to satisfy both requirements — it's easy enough to build a projector, or even re-scan the images for viewing. Has anyone got a viable alternative? Cloud storage isn't an option — this is going underground in a stainless steel container.
See also this similar question from 2008; how have the options changed in the meantime?
Just looking at the subject I was going to say very high grade film. It seems like you came to the same conclusion. You already have the reasons down.
The reason is that it will be obvious to anyone that sees it what it is and how to "decode" it. You can't say the same of any codec or digital representation. You could provide instructions about how the digital encoding works and still fail.
I guess you could provide digital media and a way to play it, but that still seems to be a roll of dice on whether it will work. However someone can take a reel of film, put it under a magnifying glass, and SEE images.
Just $.02
No projector required, only a thumb!
If you have the bucks, try the Voyager probe's "golden disk" approach.
Just don't put anything that may tick off aliens or time travelers.
Table-ized A.I.
You have very good reasons for doing film, that is a great idea.
But why not do more than one form of media storage? Put the video on a blue-ray disc, a DVD, and a CD, and a hard drive (be sure to read up on the best ways to burn these media for long term storage).
Encode it in MPEG or something simple that there's already open code for, perhaps include paper in the capsule with C code printed out for a decoder.
Even if some forms fail partly if there are multiple options present with the same content, it increases changes you can restore the full video.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But I would also put it on an "archival" DVD and track down a decent quality portable DVD player and rig it up to run on D-cells.
Film's a "worst-case" medium, but a digital copy stands a reasonably good chance of being useful.
... that shit never dies.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
When you upload it to your computer, give it a unique filename (a GUID would be good), then leave a note in the time capsule instructing them to ask the NSA to recover a copy of the file from their archives.
film and flip and digital and whatever you have. include instructions.
Digital only works if you are proactively transferring it from one generation of storage to another. Once you have skipped 2 or 3 generations of storage then it becomes (exponentially) harder to find hardware/software that will read your data. Extend that over 100 years of media evolution and you will be screwed in the future trying to read todays standards.
(And if you say "keep it on the cloud", then that only works as longs someone is paying the bills and the company stays in business)
As an example, look at how much harder it would be today to read a 5" DS floppy disk today, vs picking up a Tintype photo from the US civil war era and instantly seeing what it is.
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... likely you'll be dead when they look at it in 100 years. what are they gonna do? Dig you up and yell at you?
What are the stats/predictions these days as to how long a flash drive will last? If you had a quality flash drive you could stick it in the time capsule along with netbook or some other small sized player. It doesn't seem that unreasonable for our grid to still be on 120V in 100 years.
This actually worked! In the early days of film the Library of Congress had each frame of entire films printed onto paper to establish copyright. These prints survived while the original films disintegrated, and subsequently (albeit laboriously) were transferred back onto film.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Normal film has been used fo decades and work quite well... and has the fantastic advantage of just looking at it and seeing what is on it and how it is ment to be used.
None of the hanky panky übercool digital solutions has a solution for your problem... but the good old Super8 does.
The digtal world has miserably failed the long time archiving problem.
50 years ago digital information was typically stored on punch cards and paper tape. Those might still be readable with great care and tedious effort but would almost certainly be in no condition to be fed into vintage equipment. Someone would probably need to transcribe them optically and run them into some sort of interpreter.
100 years ago there were no computers as we know them today.
Original film from those eras still exists and is readable. While somebody might be able to dig up an ancient optical drive, USB interface and common codec specs in 50-100 years, the film is still film and can be read with good eyes or a magnifying glass. Pressed CDs & DVDs might last that long and probably stand the best chance of working equipment still existing that far into the future, but I wouldn't count on hard drives, flash memory or burnable CDs & DVDs lasting.
Upload it to the pirate bay as porn.zip.
Since in theory they'll take a longer view on preservation than a publicly-owned company might.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I was going to suggest something like this, but maybe with an iPad or other simple tablet. But the issue becomes supplying power to it. I have no idea if USB will even be around when this time capsule is opened, so you'd possibly want to include a schematic showing how to power the device.
I see these 3 dimensional images etched deep in plastic cubes via lasers, for sale in novelty stores. I wonder if something like this technique can be used to burn a pattern in a solid block of something (plastic or crystal) that could be read later (by lasers, I guess) and converted back into the original data -- which could easily be video. I'd actually be a little surprised if something like this didn't already exist. The result should have a very long shelf life, sufficient for a time capsule. There would have to be a way to bootstrap the process, giving future people, in an easily readable format, directions to decode.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Post it on youtube. Include the URL and maybe a checksum in the capsule. Make it someone's job to hold onto a copy, check once a year, and re-upload if it's gone for any reason. Make it someone else's job to make sure that someone is responsible if the first person dies or moves away, etc...
And don't forget, when choosing candidates for job #1 and job #2 put them in descending order by age.
So put instructions on how to create a Car Battery and inverter to power the thing.
We know for a fact, clay tablets with wedges used for writing will last several thousand years. If the material is interesting enough the future generation will legions of college professors and graduate students to decode it. If it is not, it is not worth preserving.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Think back to 1965. What media do you still have that you can access? Paper, and analog hardcopy LP's maybe. LP, only if you still have a working player.
1975? Same
1985? Floppy disks. How many of those do you have that are still readable? And on what device? Gen 1 CD. Probably all toast.
1995? Gen 1 DVD. Again, probably toast.
Meanwhile, while cleaning out my parents house, a photo album, with pics of my grandmother partying in a club in Harlem in the '30s, is perfectly, instantly, readable.
Film, or paper prints on archival paper.
Put the video on an Apple Time Capsule and put it inside the Time Capsule.
I don't care if it works or not, just do it to confuse the people who will be digging it up in 50 or 100 years.
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Color-stable archival film with color-stable archival prints in case the film isn't as color-stable as you hope. If you can do a second film conversion using a different type of film that would be good also. If this was for more than 100 years I would also suggest color-separations done on archival black-and-white film.
For audio, do on-film audio, a phonograph record on archival materials, and an analog magnetic tape using a recording mode that was in common use for decades, on archival materials.
In addition, I would supply DVDs on archival material, a rugged DVD player likely to still be playable in 100 years, a printed copy of the manual and a printed copy of the DVD specification, all on archival paper. If space precludes the use of printed manuals, a micfofilm copy is fine, just put it on archival materials.
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Looks like one of few digital media that might survive. Apparently if you want film to last this long you'd better make separate black and white recordings of the RGB channels, since the color dyes are much less stable and probably won't last more than like 30 years (methods B-D).
Method A: Let's begin with extended life expectancy records-those film documents that need to last for a very long time. Nothing can last forever, but hundreds of years or longer is possible. Color originals should be made on high-quality camera-color-negative film such as EASTMAN EXR Color Negative Film, having a set of properly exposed and processed black-and-white separation positives made for the red, green, and blue records onto EASTMAN Panchromatic Separation Film on ESTAR Base. Then you should store the original negative and separation positives and the master positive and duplicate negative, that were made from the original negative, at the keeping conditions specified earlier.
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Not true, Jacquard loom cards and Hollerinth cards that are more than 100 years old are in museums
A different post on Paperback (software to create a computer readable binary dump on paper) got me to thinking, shy not store the actual video images on paper directly?
There are lots of ways to make a flip book, and how to print on paper for long term storage is pretty well known.
You may argue this is the same as film, but I see it as a slightly more sure option - film itself is not all that stable and degrades over time. An actual dump of all film images to paper would be the ultimate backup should other measures of storage fail.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually, IBM 80-column punched cards have lasted almost this long (since 1928) as a readable format, although it would take a HUGE number of cards to do color motion video.
Something like the fulcrum on Blacklist
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I'd give the memory in those devices a decade tops before they're useless, you won't have someone reflashing them every 5 years. Which is rotting faster than the capacitors in that power supply, but not by much. I'm amused at everyone who thinks modern high-tech consumer grade crap is going to be useful in even 20 years.
100 years isn't so long. They people who open the container will almost certainly be able to read instructions - and probably have reasonable technology to access the contents. But maybe they don't care enough to go to a lot of trouble to do it? It's very likely that the images you store will still be easily accessible in the future.
If you don't think they'll go to very much trouble - then you should provide them with the means to replay the data as well as the data itself. There are plenty of small video players (like a cheap digital camera or an MP3 player with video capability) - so long as you pack them appropriately and protect them from crazy temperature variations, they should last a long time in storage and still work at the end. Provide written instructions on what power requirements the machine has - and what buttons to push to access the content.
But quite honestly - there is unlikely to be anything in the data you provide that won't be accessible by then.
I would stick with physical objects that would be of historical interest, personal items - a snapshot of the times when the capsule was buried.
Maybe it would be worth trying to find people who've opened capsules like this - and ask them what was found to be most valuable from the contents?
-- Steve
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I seem to remember reading about something like this in a scifi novel years ago. An alien race had set up an automated broadcast that was transmitted to the galaxy at large every century or something like that. The broadcast was a digital signal that clearly broke into bytes of some arbitrary length that I don't recall. Each group of three bytes expressed an X and Y coordinate and a value for color on a grayscale. The coordinates for X and Y ranged from zero to some prime number and progressed in a manner consistent with scanning from bottom to top or something like that and new frames were easily recognized because the X and Y coordinates started back at zero. When recognized as video and played back it depicted the demise of their civilization and the efforts they had made to preserve and cache their knowledge for future civilizations.
I was going to suggest something like this, but maybe with an iPad or other simple tablet. But the issue becomes supplying power to it. I have no idea if USB will even be around when this time capsule is opened, so you'd possibly want to include a schematic showing how to power the device.
It'd be awfully surprising if the knowledge of Volt as a unit of measurement will be lost to the world in 100 years (assuming that society hasn't collapsed), so supplying power shouldn't be a problem. I'd be surprised if the data lasts on on the flash drive that long. Maybe an old school burnt ROM chip (not EEPROM) would be safer. And make sure to leave instructions for replacing other components that might degrade, like capacitors.
No, seriously. It is a technology based on vinyl records, instead of encoding audio it encodes video as well - on an analogue groove track. Given a stable enough substrate - platinum base with a gold electroplating for instance, such as on the Voyager records - it'll last practically forever.
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Electrolysis can destroy any metal. Stray currents coupled with soil humidity can result in corrosion. I'm not a "Time Capsule" designer, but I think the SS can ought to go in a very thick Polyethylene container that is spin welded closed and leak checked.
Get some archival-grade DVD or Blu-ray media and then include one of those little portable DVD players (with a wall plug). Include a few extra pure-digital formats like theora, mp4, etc on separate media, just in case. Put it in a separate airtight container and make sure to include lots of silica gel.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
the filtration banks are CMY for positive prints off positive media. for positive prints from negative media, you use RGB filter packs. for wacky shit, rules are out the window, including the "correct" chemical packs for each type of media.
I don't think you want to make 3xBW Technicolor type storage for a time capsule, you have to do everything three ways and figure out what to do with filters, sync, etc. good stable dyes on a polyester base in a low-humidity sealed container not subject to temperatures way outside shirtsleeve weather should last at least 100 years.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Actually, IBM 80-column punched cards have lasted almost this long (since 1928) as a readable format, although it would take a HUGE number of cards to do color motion video.
If you're going to use punch cards, you'd be better off printing each video frame on a card and building a flip-book as someone suggested earlier. Much better data density.
real pressed CD-ROM (not CD-R) with an MPEG-2 video file
the CD-ROM standard is 30 years old already, and the MPEG-2 standard is 20 years old. both will be obtainable without too much difficulty in 100 years, assuming no catastrophic global upheaval but if WWIII & WWIV happen nobody is going to care about your time capsule
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
... how about some flip-books?
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
While I was waiting to see if this would make the front page, I called a post-production business based at the Village Roadshow studios on the Gold Coast http://www.movieworldstudios.c...
and asked them about a transfer from video to film.
No-one does it in Australia. Lots of people doing film to video, but apparently I would need to send it to Technicolor in Thailand for a video-to-film transfer. And it would cost a lot more than the budget for the event. They suggested storage on multiple formats from Kodak Gold discs to USB memory sticks, using open-source codecs, with the codec whitepaper included.
There's always the cheap film-to-video method - project your film on a screen and point a video camera at it, but do it in reverse, i.e. point a film camera at my LCD monitor. I've got a super 8 camera, but it's silent, so the audio would have to be recorded separately.
I also got a look at the capsule - it's got about 1 or perhaps 2 cubic feet of storage, so it's not going to cope with more than a few minutes of film reels, having to compete with whatever else goes in. I'll add a DVD and a USB stick with some instructions.
As it's not going to be a surprise for those who open the capsule (copies of footage are going to the state library and anyone who wants a copy on DVD), I think I'll contact the National Film & Sound Archive http://www.nfsa.gov.au/ and ask them to store a copy, then include a nice letter in the capsule: "Would you like to see a movie of this? Ask at the Qld State Library or the National Film & Sound Archive."
Heh - captcha is "paranoia"
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Chisel a bunch of zeros and ones into blocks of concrete with codec instructions in text. For a 1 MB video, you need 8 million bits or so (without audio), giving about 72 square meters of concrete if you use 3 mm cells. They'd love you for it.
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Its my understanding that Laserdisc, the once fringe format that was usurped by DVD, differed in that, instead of a codec that recorded deviations from the previous frame, stored each and every video frame on the disc. I would think this might make for the best method to retrieve the information. To be sure, you could include the entire patent library for the laserdisc technology to ensure accurate reproduction in 100yrs time.
patents are actually helpful in this situation. A patent has with it, exact information as to exactly how something works. Unless the MPAA bastards manage to keep patents alive longer than their current expiration dates, there wouldn't be a concern over patent rights in 100yrs.
isnt the One Laptop Per Child device also equipped with a hand crank to charge a li-ion battery?
Don't use one medium, use many.
Use open source codecs and include the codecs and their source on the media
1. An MP4 on an SD Card.
2. A DVD - in a case and shrink-wrapped.
3. A USB thumb drive.
4. Also A shrinkwrapped tablet in a sealed container might last 100 years.
Put the Video on a tablet.
Shut down the tablet.
Remove the battery from the tablet.
Shrink wrap the tablet and place the tablet in a sealed container.
Now all they have to do is add a battery in the future or connect power and turn the tablet on to see the video.