[WEB4LIB] Re: [Formats for audio/video in electronic theses]

[Mark Jordan]

Hi Leo,

You wrote:

> You might want to think about storing the video in Quicktime using the
> Animation codec set at little or no compression. You can then burn this
> to a CD-ROM. This is a common enough solution for people in the multimedia
> biz and it might work for you as well.

As far as I know, QuickTime is a proprietary format so adopting it for
theses material would force the use of Apple software to access or
manipulate the material in the future. Since the multimedia biz is heavily
Apple-centric, this may not be a problem for people in that business. Or
does Apple make the specification for QuickTime open to anyone, as Adobe
does for PDF?

Defacto standards like PDF and QuickTime are good for display and
delivery, but they change frequently and at the whim of the company that
controls them. It's the mid-to-long term storage of the files that I'm
more worried about.

Mark


Mark Jordan
Librarian / Analyst, Systems Division
W.A.C. Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 1S6, Canada
Phone (604) 291 5753 / Fax (604) 291 3023
mjordan at sfu.ca / http://www.sfu.ca/~mjordan/