I’ve thought of putting the photos, videos, and document scans on archive.org. Also wondered about using IPFS or long-duration DVDs. And of course miniature archiving as in this post (But it sounds awfully expensive.)
As of now experience shows that the media that survives abandonement the best is physical. Paper (not every kind of paper tho), Film, Vinyl survives being in an attic for 100 years.
As far as I know film is what the National Archives have chosen for the archival of all relevant movies even if they have been shot digitally and I guess they know a thing or two about archiving.
A computer that plays back a Prores file has so many more "moving" parts it is not even funny. You have the spinning rust that may or may not be faulty, then you have the read head that may or may not be faulty, then the spinning rust has a disk controller on it, that may or may not be faulty, then you have a connector on that drive that may or may not exist anymore, then you have a filesystem on that disk that may or may not be supported anymore, and then you get the container format, that may or may not be supported in that version anymore and you get the CODEC which may or may not be supported anymore.
But from the outside it just looks like a hard drive. Unless someone really made good labels and they are readable, and you trust the label you won't even know what is on there and if it is worth all the hassle. Meanwhile with a roll of film or a photograph you just see the thing that is on there. It might have scratches, be half rotten, faded colors and all, but in many cases such things are still somewhat "readable" after a century of bad storage.
Any FFMPEG-based player can play it, including bundled ffplay. And lots of others. I actually have a hard time to find a player that does not play .rm/.rmvb files.
What do you mean?
It is great if todays VLC plays your file. Just make sure to regularily check over the course of the next 50 years if that is still the case. If stable archival is your goal there not many things that beat lasering something onto physical film where in the worst of situations you'd be even able to look at the pictures with your own eyes and rebuilding a projector after the collapse of society is probably easier than rebuilding a computer running an OS that reads that disk with software that plays that file of which you might know precisely nothing without being able to decode it.
This is why e.g. national archives use film for storage.
Not that this is a feasible solution for the private person, but sometimes considering a low tech solution might be the least complicated "do and forget" option.
If your ancestors find your bluray disks or some old hard drives they might find some challenges:
- they might not know what those are
- if they have an idea what those are, they might not have the connectors or devices needed to play them back
- if they have the devices needed the device might not be able to read the file system because it is not supported anymore
- if the filesystem is supported, the file format might not be
This is a lot of hoops to jump through for something where you don't even know what is on it.
Meanwhile a old picture book can be just looked at.
I eventually downloaded the zip and made it into an iso that I could mount in a VM of Windows that had RealPlayer installed. Failed attempts included VLC and some other Mac video player (Elgato?), and trying to navigate to the page from a Windows VM (no https). I would love to here of a less tedious solution.
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ffplay plays it just fine by default, but neither VLC nor mpv does, that's rare! Funny I found this thread while searching for a particular discussion about ffplay.
Looking at its output, libav thinks the file has 15 streams: 5 data, 3 audio, and 7 video. Of these only the mentioned two are playable. Evidently ffplay uses ffmpeg's probing and stream selection, while the other players just try to play the first of each type.
Of the other streams, ffmpeg `-c copy -f data` can only dump two of the data streams. These contain the names of the HTM files and what looks like more compressed data. Searching turns up nothing but other university websites describing how to use it - this synchronized slideshow format (apparently not SMIL) looks lost indeed.
note to self: mpv can be started with `--aid=2 --vid=2` (1-indexed), but VLC has only `--audio-track=1` (0-indexed) and lacks a video track option despite having an open issue since 2009. For completeness, ffplay would use `-ast 6 -vst 9` (undifferentiated and 0-indexed).
I keep seeing this idea pop up from time to time and I just don't get it. Even if the format is somehow still undocumented despite once being popular, the original players/viewers for it must still exist. Due to the popularity, sure enough there will be enough copies of that software around forever, including on places like archive.org. From there, you have options:
- Run the original software on hardware from that time
- Run the corresponding OS in an emulator and run the software on it
- Reverse engineer the software, document the format, and build a player/viewer for those files for your modern
In the particular case of RealPlayer videos though, I'm sure I could play one on my M1 Mac in IINA or VLC with no trouble.
After all, if I said "try opening a Generations Family Tree .cht file and you'll know what I mean" - would you know what I mean?
Perhaps the most famous example is the BBC Domesday Project [1] which paid homage to a 900-year-old book in the form of... a LaserDisc. The data isn't entirely lost - but only thanks to the effort of computer history museums.
No, I've never heard about neither this program nor its file format. Strangely I can't even find a copy I could download — but there's its manual on archive.org and several sites that could sell me a CD...
But even if the program that made the file is lost, you could try reverse engineering the format by collecting as many files as you could find. It's harder, but it's still worth giving a shot.
But then again, how popular was that program?
> the BBC Domesday Project [1] which paid homage to a 900-year-old book in the form of... a LaserDisc.
I read the wiki article and it's wild how it depended on one particular computer and disc reader model. I didn't even know there was a standard for encoding digital data onto LaserDiscs (granted, I've never seen a LaserDisc in person to begin with).
But my point is that your examples are all from the early days of widespread computing. You can't just extrapolate it like that. There weren't established standard formats for things back then. Also a lot more software was proprietary AND platform-specific. Today, even if a file format is "unknown", poke at it with a hex editor or the `file` utility and there's a high probability that it's actually something standard like a zip archive or an sqlite database. It's not like we'll ever lose the knowledge of how to read and display a JPEG image from a DVD, unless our entire civilization somehow suffers a collapse so severe we go back to stone age.
What's the best way to preserve the artifacts of your own life and ensure they're disseminated after you're dead, or at least available, especially if you're a solitary person with no foreseeable descendants?
GitHub?
Why isn't there a service like that? or is there? Something that makes your files public based on some condition.
That would be a barrier for many people, especially those with Impostor Syndrome who would never consider anything they do "valuable", but would still like to leave something behind.
Basically a snapshot of your digital footprint at the time of your death.
You see the problem..
Do it yourself while you’re alive.
Failing that curate everything in the ‘release’ state and then have a law firm execute your last will and testament with everything they need to make it public.
If you have the tools you can also use microfiche.
And since you need a second copy to be even close to safe, I'd try to prepay a historically reliable web host for many years of service. And/or get a safe deposit box.