[geeks] I haven't gotten into this yet but I need some advice

[David Cantrell]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 10:48:27AM -0700, David Passmore wrote:
> I have been archiving video for several years in many different formats, and
> I can only give you one piece of advice: you should make your best effort to
> record the first time in the format that you want the video to stay in
> forever. If it is destined for DVD, record straight to MPEG-2. You don't
> necessarily have to burn it to DVD right away. Recompression sucks.

Forever is an awfully long time!  I recommend recording and archiving
uncompressed, and only transferring to a medium which uses compression when
it's time to play it back.  If you can't directly record uncompressed,
record analogue and *then* transfer to uncompressed digital storage.

Do *not* optimise your recording for $medium.  There will come a time when
you can no longer play it back, not because the medium has decayed, but
because the playback equipment simply doesn't exist.  Instead, optimise for
the best data capture you can manage, which you can then convert into
whatever the playback medium flavour of the month^Wdecade is.

The BBC has items in its archives for which the last playback device bit
the dust years ago.  These archived items often contain the only recording
in existence of historically valuable events.  Even CDs and DVDs aren't
good enough - there will come a time when there are no working CD players,
or the CDs have decayed beyond salvage - so the solution now is to store
everything on hard disk, in the knowledge that it'll all have to be
transferred to new media sooner or later.  At least hard disk storage is
cheap and easy, and most importantly, it's trivially easy to add items (so
people aren't tempted to just not bother archiving) and easy to pull
copies from the archives once they're properly indexed.  I believe that
all *new* programming gets archived automagically, but there is a staff
spending all their time digitising and indexing older items.

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

Us Germans take our humour very seriously
  -- German cultural attache talking to the Today Programme,
     about the German supposed lack of a sense of humour, 29 Aug 2001