Dave Rice

Determining what codecs, containers, and specifications should be favored in audiovisual preservation and how to use them is an ongoing dialogue within archives. Media preservation is a relatively small community and thus often relies on technology and recommendations from larger related communities such as broadcast, media production, and increasingly open source development to support the objectives of audiovisual preservation. As the machinery and skills needed to sustain access to film and analog video collections decay it is increasingly urgent for archives to address blocking technological issues in order to re-format legacy audiovisual recordings to digital formats efficiently. This presentation reviews the requirements and demands on technology within audiovisual preservation projects and assesses the opportunities for existing open source technology to contribute to resolving preservation challenges. The presentation will focus on lossless audiovisual codecs, technical and contextual metadata, and both the openness and standardization of relevant file formats.