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Comment by susam | Hacker News Reader

About 14 years ago, at my first job, I worked with a colleague[1] who introduced me to the wonderful world of open source: the culture, the philosophy, how to submit patches to open source projects, etc. He also introduced me to Debian GNU/Linux which I use actively to this day.

One day, he began working on certain audio/video encoding problems that needed to be solved for our project. He chose FFmpeg as the primary tool around which he began building his solution. After having spent several days with FFmpeg, figuring out and documenting various ways of using FFmpeg to solve all our audio/video encoding problems, one day, when we went out for lunch, he declared to the team,

"FFmpeg is awesome! If you give me a shoe, I will turn it into a video file!"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=topa

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Yeah, it’s been said that ffmpeg and vlc could play a vinyl record if you fed it to them.

It’s not actually true, but it is story true.

> It’s not actually true, but it is story true.

Glad to see this phrase from The Things They Carried outlive the book.

What if you pass it a high-res photo of a vinyl record? There ought to be a transcoder plugin for that lying around somewhere!

Imagine someday we can take photos from slices of a brain and use it replay a person’s memories, and the program used for that would of course be ffmpeg.

It sometimes creeps me out to consider how much information may one day be extracted from artifacts we create today.

This can be done, and indeed was done for an ancient photograph of an ancient record that no longer existed. In that case I think they used some photoshop magic to ‘unspiral’ the groove and something else to decode the image. The result wasn’t super high quality.

Vinyl starts as a poor material for recording music and only gets worse with age and use. Take a picture if it on old film and develop it with old techniques, and you end up with the worst possible recording medium. I'm impressed they got anything from it.

There's a recording medium which is worse than a photograph of vinyl.

None.

If an old photo is what you've got, make the best at extracting from it.

This seems like an argument against something I didn't say in the comment you replied to. Maybe I misunderstood you.

There's at least a plausible interpretation of your earlier comment that the attempt was futile or without merits.

The OP makes clear that this was the only viable way of extracting information. 1 >>> 0.

Also, as a sufficiently early recording (anything before the mid-1940s), the medium would have been shellac or wax rather than vinyl. Shellac especially is immensely fragile and prone to shatter when handling.

Your interpretation was incorrect.

Your expression was unclear.

I'm not telling you what you meant.

I'm telling you what I heard, and, in reponse to your implied question, why I'd responded as I had.

I’m surprised this worked at all. Do you have a link?

Yes, NPR covered it ~15 years ago: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=118518...

I worked on an earlier version of this project where we actually had to play the albums but we also took high res (300 dpi tifs) of the individual records with the hope that we'd never have to physically touch them again. So I'll claim contributing to this effort. ;)

Any particular reason they couldn't use one of these laser vinyl turntables?

"It looks like somebody just got hungry and took a bite out of it," says Haber. He has positioned the record on a turntable and fitted the broken piece back into place, like it's a jigsaw puzzle. "If we spun this thing fast, the piece would come flying off, you know, and maybe hit somebody," he says.

Paragraph 2 of the link.

In that particular case, definitely. More generally, it's risk.

Every time an archivist touches the media - no matter gloves, a clean environment, the care applied, etc - there's a risk of altering or even damaging it. In our case, the eventual goal was to keep the ever-deteriorating originals in nitrogen-filled vaults.

Therefore, if you can avoid having to touch it often (or ever), then you've managed to protect it better, probably longer, and more cheaply.

Right.

Static, high-resolution photography (or other imaging) is about the least-invasive, lowest-risk options available.

The tech to do it is almost there. https://www.windytan.com/2017/07/gramophone-audio-from-photo...

The only thing I can think of is the quote:

“The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction.”

―Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach

>Yeah, it’s been said that ffmpeg and vlc could play a vinyl record if you fed it to them.

ffmpeg is doing all the heavy lifting there. VLC mostly uses libraries from ffmpeg.

I have no idea why people are so impressed by VLC. Anything built on libavcodec can play all the same files, but they won't have VLC's deficiencies in performance, quality, reliability, or usability. ffmpeg is a great project and VLC an incompetent one riding its coattails.

While ffmpeg does support a lot of really old / obscure media formats, support isn’t nearly as good for professional broadcast / film video formats. DNxHD can be hit or miss and it doesn’t support formats like OMF or AAF. I have heard some broadcasters’ QC departments reject ProRes created by ffmpeg as invalid.

It is probably following the spec too closely.

Like when Apple added ExFat support and Windows couldn't handle it, because Microsoft only wrote the spec. They didn't follow it.

I found ffmpeg supports HAP Q pretty good, which is a decent intermediary format.

"Unix" for video. Love it :)

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