[WEB4LIB] Audio and video archiving

[rich at richardwiggins.com]

We had a thread on this a while back.  I'm afraid there aren't any black-and-white answers.

I think it's good that you recognize that archival formats are different than Web distribution formats.  I still vote for Real because of its market share, but folks I trust claim Microsoft's ASF gives more bang for the byte, and you will of course find lots of Quicktime adherents.  In any case, I think true streaming is still essential. Whatever choice you make, expect nasty email from adherents of the others.  :-)

As for archive formats, I vote for DVD.  Unfortunately there are many variants of desktop DVD formats right now.  See:

http://www.videoguys.com/DVDhome.html

There are dub houses that will make real DVD disks for not too much per.  I think that's a viable choice as there will be millions of DVD players for decades.

You might want to poke around film and DV sites and newsgroups.  The Web site for DV Magazine has a good thread on the Web format issue:

http://www.dv.com/db_area/community/Forum5/HTML/000197.html

Cleanup and transfer of various formats seems like a huge challenge.  Good luck!  Would be nice to hear progress reports...

/rich


On Wed, 03 October 2001, "Gary Benton" wrote:

> 
> What kind of equipment and software are needed for audio and video archiving? We have film movies, obsolete videotape formats and so on in our archives. We want to preserve these materials and make them available on the web. 
> 
> What formats (WAV, AVI...) would you recommend for preservation? 
> What formats (MPEG...) would you recommend for web distribution?
> 
> Can anyone point me to sources of info in this area? 
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Gary
> 
> Gary Benton
> Library Systems Technician
> Walla Walla College
> 
> 
> 
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_____________________________________________________

Richard Wiggins
Writing, Speaking, and Consulting on the Internet
rich at richardwiggins.com  http://richardwiggins.com