[LINK] Guidelines for Digital Repositories, Canberra, 27 July

[Nick Bannon]

On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 11:24:13AM +1000, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
> >On 2006 Jul 21, at 10:11 AM, Gordon Keith wrote:
> >>Related to this topic, does anyone know if any guidelines exist in  
> >>terms of codecs suitable for archival of video data?
[...]
> Though some cameras seem to be
> coming out with record to DVD (MPEG2 - royalties via license to
> manufacturers) rather than raw DV to tape.
[...]
> On video compression formats, I am playing with MPEG4 (royalty issue
> cloudy) and Theora (open source and format).

For archival, DV, or using only the I frames in MPEG (2), would be
reasonable, though still fairly voluminous compared to inter-frame
compression in MPEG2 and MPEG4.

Theora is useful and unrestricted now and soon enough it should be
complemented at the high end by Dirac, which the BBC has been working on:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/projects/dirac/
http://www.theora.org/

...and of course, once compressed with one lossy codec, it can only lose
quality if transcoded to another.

Nick.

-- 
   Nick Bannon   | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick-sig at rcpt.to | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal