How to Future-Proof Digital Media?
August 11, 2009
Digital media is not immune to the winds of time. In many ways, it’s even more ephemeral than the analogue forms it’s meant to usurp. Unlike, say, books or photographs—which can be placed on a shelf and enjoyed decades later—the binary codes of today’s movie, photo, and music collections may not be decipherable on future machines.
For music, your choices are pretty well defined: If you’re more concerned about space than fidelity, go with the ubiquitous MP3. If you need to hear every nuance and have the gigs to back your play, WAV (the CD’s audio format) is a good bet for lossless audio.
When dealing with images, most archivists recommend a raw format (if you’ve got terabytes to spare) or TIFF. But both can be tricky. Raw files are the unmolested data captured by a camera’s sensor. Each manufacturer has its own version, and you’ll need special software to decode it. As long as you keep the program, you should be OK, and you’ll benefit from the best possible image quality.
TIFF, is a high-quality compression scheme that has remained mostly unchanged since 1992. But it’s a proprietary Adobe format. If that makes you nervous, use common compressed standards like JPEG or PNG; they’ll likely be readable for years, though they can’t match raw or TIFF files for quality.
Movies are a bit dicier as digital video is relatively new. The H.264 standard seems poised to emerge as a universal format, at least for HD video. But MPEG-2—the native language of DVDs—is the undisputed king of standard-def moving pictures.
For more, please visit http://www.wired.com/
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