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?

  • MasterChiefmas@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    For any reasonably popular format, I wouldn’t worry about it. GIF is a bad format by modern standards, it’s 36 years old, and it still works.

    Between virtual machines, and the Internet itself, I find it highly unlikely to ever be a problem with any (video/image)format in common use today. The very _worst_ case, is you’d have to find the spec, and write your own codec to view something. I have no fear that it’ll become a problem to find the specs for jpeg or GIF in my lifetime, to say nothing of formats that were open from day 1 like PNG.

    The scenarios where we have trouble accessing common media formats in the next say, 50 years at least, all seem like ones where we’d have bigger problems then looking at old family photos.

    Your concern as a general idea isn’t without merit- it’s just I wouldn’t really worry about it applying to image or video formats. We can still play RealMedia fine and how long has it been since that’s had any relevance? The thing with these formats too, is once the codec has been built, if a format ceases having relevance, there’s very little downside/reason not to just keep including them in players. Computing architecture would have to under go a massive, unexpected shift to make anything outright stop working in the near future(at least on non-Apple platforms), and even then, source exists for a lot of open source apps that you’d just need to get to recompile on said new platform.

    Honestly, the state of data formats and such these days, the problem with dead formats anyone cared about becoming on nearly permanently inaccessible has probably already come and gone as computers become a commodity and standardized down to a few platforms.

    For these common use formats, I suspect the problem is far more of a hypothetical then a real possibility.