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Data Storage Australia Media

Ask Slashdot: Video Storage For Time Capsule? 169

Posted by timothy from the what-would-vint-cerf-do? dept.
New submitter dwywit, anticipating World Backup Day, writes I've been asked to film this year's ANZAC services in my town. This is a big one, as it's the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign, and dear to our hearts here in Oz. The organisers have asked me to provide a camera-to-projector setup for remote viewing (they're expecting big crowds this year), and a recording of the parade and various services throughout the morning. Copies will go to the local and state library as a record of the day, but they would also like a copy to go into a time capsule. I have two issues to solve: 1. a storage medium capable of lasting 50 or 100 years and still be readable, and 2. a wrapper/codec that will be available and usable when the capsule is opened. I have the feeling that a conversion to film might be the only way to satisfy both requirements — it's easy enough to build a projector, or even re-scan the images for viewing. Has anyone got a viable alternative? Cloud storage isn't an option — this is going underground in a stainless steel container. See also this similar question from 2008; how have the options changed in the meantime?
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Ask Slashdot: Video Storage For Time Capsule? More

Ask Slashdot: Video Storage For Time Capsule?

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  • Film! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MickyTheIdiot ( 1032226 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @01:59PM (#49226719) Homepage Journal

    Just looking at the subject I was going to say very high grade film. It seems like you came to the same conclusion. You already have the reasons down.

    The reason is that it will be obvious to anyone that sees it what it is and how to "decode" it. You can't say the same of any codec or digital representation. You could provide instructions about how the digital encoding works and still fail.

    I guess you could provide digital media and a way to play it, but that still seems to be a roll of dice on whether it will work. However someone can take a reel of film, put it under a magnifying glass, and SEE images.

    Just $.02

    • Re:Film! (Score:5, Informative)

      by primebase ( 9535 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @02:09PM (#49226779)

      Polyester-based film stock specifically, with an optical soundtrack printed right on it. Dead simple to view or engineer a playback device for, from scratch if necessary. I believe it is what the Library of Congress is using these days.

      http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/07078/preserve.html

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Three black and white strips with real silver emulsion -- clearly labeled "red filter" "green filter" "blue filter" -- black and white film lasts much longer than dye based color film.

        • Why RGB? I thought everything non-digital used CYMK?

          • Re:Film! (Score:5, Informative)

            by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @03:18PM (#49227361) Journal

            Why RGB? I thought everything non-digital used CYMK?

            Light-projection is additive, so RGB. Printing on paper is subtractive, so CMYK. More details here. [cruxcreative.com]

          • the filtration banks are CMY for positive prints off positive media. for positive prints from negative media, you use RGB filter packs. for wacky shit, rules are out the window, including the "correct" chemical packs for each type of media.

            I don't think you want to make 3xBW Technicolor type storage for a time capsule, you have to do everything three ways and figure out what to do with filters, sync, etc. good stable dyes on a polyester base in a low-humidity sealed container not subject to temperatures

      • Polyester-based film stock specifically, with an optical soundtrack printed right on it. Dead simple to view or engineer a playback device for, from scratch if necessary. I believe it is what the Library of Congress is using these days.

        http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/07078/preserve.html

        Good post. However I must point out that the LoC is not the same as a time capsule. The latter does not have the advantage of active monitoring and maintenance of the health and environment of the archive. You need a medium that can survive for 50 to 100 years undisturbed (i.e., neglected) in an uncontrolled environment.

        • They've pulled mostly usable film out of hellish enviornments, as long as it doesn't catch fire it'll be mostly usable.

        • I assume the capsule is buried in the ground (perhaps TFA would tell me), that would probably be stable enough. Else, I'd look for a place people have been making cheese for centuries before active environment control systems.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

        I would throw in a DVD and maybe a compressed version on another optical disk.
        Who knows. Add the source code to play the both on another disks and you may be doing them a huge service.
        BTW use archival quality optical media.

    • You can get pretty cheap and pretty small computers, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to put both a film copy and a digital copy into the time capsule. Put a Raspberry Pi or something similar in there win an OS the boots up and auto plays the movie on an SD Card. If it doesn't work, you haven't lost much. If it turns out that they still have HDMI in 50 to 100 years when they open it, they will be able to play the video instantly. Some people say that SD cards degrade after a few years, even without writing t

      • If you're going to put an Raspberry Pi in there, you might as well put a small cheap LCD on it just in case they don't have HDMI.. There are some pretty cheap options, and they they'll hopefully only have to apply power (include the AC adapter).

        Include an M-disc with the video in a lot of common formats also as a backup..

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by TWX ( 665546 )

          If you're going to put an Raspberry Pi in there, you might as well put a small cheap LCD on it just in case they don't have HDMI.. There are some pretty cheap options, and they they'll hopefully only have to apply power (include the AC adapter).

          This may be a problem, UNIX Time [wikipedia.org] has some known issues with variable size. You must either use a 32-bit version capable of handling Dates higher than 2038 [wikipedia.org], or you must use a 64 bit version that's able to do it right.

          Personally I'd go with film. Three individua

          • If you're going to put an Raspberry Pi in there, you might as well put a small cheap LCD on it just in case they don't have HDMI.. There are some pretty cheap options, and they they'll hopefully only have to apply power (include the AC adapter).

            This may be a problem, UNIX Time [wikipedia.org] has some known issues with variable size. You must either use a 32-bit version capable of handling Dates higher than 2038 [wikipedia.org], or you must use a 64 bit version that's able to do it right.

            Well the whole OS refuse to boot because it can't go past 2038? If it's just playing a video who cares if it's showing the wrong time? I mean I assume a coin battery or whatever would be keeping the system time alive (I haven't purchased a Pi yet) would be dead by then (and you would probably remove it for storage for 100 years anyway) so when the device booted it would presumably show the default epoch time (which for Unix at least I think is January 1st 1970). If you're just watching a video I can't think

            • It's worse than that. The Raspberry Pi doesn't come with a clock.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by TWX ( 665546 )
              I was simply pointing out something that could cause a problem if it's not researched. The more advanced the software running on the device, the greater likelihood for problems if something like some kind of security feature of the OS gets made because of a significant date mismatch.

              You don't want to be the equivalent of that old Plymouth [wikipedia.org] that was put into a time capsule in the late '50s, that no one considered the groundwater level fluctuation along with seasonal flooding and the car ended up a rusted

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Altrag ( 195300 )

          And you expect any of that to last 50-100 years?

          Film, photographs, cave drawings, etc have the advantage that they're direct representations of what they're depicting. If half a film gets destroyed, you can still watch the other half. If your projector doesn't work you can get a bright light and a magnifying glass.

          Encoded representations (especially digital but even analog encodings like a vinyl record) require a working decoder. If your decoder is broken and you don't know how its encoded in order to bu

          • Encoded representations (especially digital but even analog encodings like a vinyl record) require a working decoder. If your decoder is broken and you don't know how its encoded in order to build a new one, you're screwed. There's absolutely nothing you can recover in that case.

            I find these arguments to be specious.

            If you really want to do this, I'd use M.Disc, which is designed for extreme logevity (and almost certainly would last in a "time capsule" that is temperature- and light-insulated).

            The idea to include an actual computer is also good. I'd throw in another M.Disc that is bootable and contains the operating system, too, in case the magnetic domains on the hard drive or electric domains on SSD break down. SSD seems tempting because of no moving parts but I'm not sure

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Altrag ( 195300 )

              Ok. So you have some long-term media. You include the player on the media itself. Solves half the problem.

              You can't really just "include Linux" because future computers might not support x86/x64/whatever architecture you included. Same for including codecs and/or playback software. Including the computer requires having hardware that itself will last 50-100 years. All the Linuxes and VLCs and GPL licenses in the world will do you exactly squat if you can't even get the machine to POST.

              Of course I'm as

      • For the power problem, why not put a hand crank generator in there too?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Power should be easy - electricity has been around for a couple of centuries, so all you really need to do is provide a break out cable and say "Ground" and "+5V @ 1A". (We've used volts forever). This is especially easy since volts and amps are based on fundamental constants so even if in 50 years they went to dabblequads and quibblewhats, it's a trivial matter to convert between the two units.

        And yeah, ye olde analog media is best. Film or even printed paper can be easily preserved, and it's really easy t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

        odds are the caps or some other part of the computer will be dead by then.

    • I think he is correct film would be a good option along with a playback device it would be far more simple to fix if anything should go wrong. Although if you must do digital I would recommend that you get a portable dvd player with screen like you might get for use in a car make sure it has instruction on how to power it. AA batteries have been around since the 1940s and are still very common.

  • Flip Book! (Score:5, Funny)

    by NEDHead ( 1651195 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @02:06PM (#49226763)

    No projector required, only a thumb!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jhon ( 241832 )

      You beat me to the punch. It sounds like a flip response but it really is the best option for 50-100 years. It'll survive almost anything. Even if the end result is brittle, you can still reconstruct the "book" one page at a time through whatever "photocopy" technology exists in the 2060's.

      • This actually worked! In the early days of film the Library of Congress had each frame of entire films printed onto paper to establish copyright. These prints survived while the original films disintegrated, and subsequently (albeit laboriously) were transferred back onto film.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]

        .

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          This actually worked! In the early days of film the Library of Congress had each frame of entire films printed onto paper to establish copyright.

          That's because in the early days of movies, we didn't have "moves" as a copyrightable item. So movies, being motion pictures, were printed onto paper and copyrighted that way as photographs. It was only later that movies were copyrightable in and of themselves and you didn't have to work around it by printing it to paper.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      No projector required, only a thumb

      I'm from the future; we don't have thumbs anymore, you insensitive clod!

  • Why not do multiple forms? (Score:3)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @02:15PM (#49226821)

    You have very good reasons for doing film, that is a great idea.

    But why not do more than one form of media storage? Put the video on a blue-ray disc, a DVD, and a CD, and a hard drive (be sure to read up on the best ways to burn these media for long term storage).

    Encode it in MPEG or something simple that there's already open code for, perhaps include paper in the capsule with C code printed out for a decoder.

    Even if some forms fail partly if there are multiple options present with the same content, it increases changes you can restore the full video.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by OzPeter ( 195038 )

      Put the video on a blue-ray disc, a DVD, and a CD

      There were studies done years ago showing how optical media degrades over time. And they ere done when the idea of optical media was new. Now imagine extrapolating that 100 years.

      • There were studies done years ago showing how optical media degrades over time.

        Yes, which is why I said to read up on how to do it properly. If you are just affecting dyes things will decay quickly, if you are actually changing the physical structure of the disc there's a good chance it may last that long... especially in an environmentally stable time capsule.

        • I have factory pressed (not "burned") CD's that are twenty years old at this point and saw regular use when they were new, all of which still read fine. I see no reason why a freshly pressed disc (CD, DVD, BluRay... whatever) couldn't last 100 years, especially if you vacuum-sealed it after placing it in a standard case. However, I would still include two or three copies for redundancy, and maybe see if you can get the disc-presser to run blanks from different lots.
      • Inexpensive optical media recorded with a commercial CD/DVD/BD-ROM burner degrades over time yes. But actual stamped optical media (like store-bought CD's/DVD's/etc) does not degrade. Of course, that requires more expensive equipment than a $40 burner. But it might be worth looking into, depending on how much money is being put into the project.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by slew ( 2918 )

        Put the video on a blue-ray disc, a DVD, and a CD

        There were studies done years ago showing how optical media degrades over time. And they ere done when the idea of optical media was new. Now imagine extrapolating that 100 years.

        Commercial media quality is often less than archival quality media...

        You should check out the folks at M-DISC [mdisc.com]. They claim that the inorganic recording layer in their archival write-once Blu-Ray discs can survive ISO standards testing procedures that give it an estimated lifetime over 100 years (in standard storage conditions).

        Recording MPEG2 redundantly on a few of these discs stored in a waterproof container, it should be reasonable to expect a 100 year life times (as much as any other media you might fin

      • This is not limited to recordable media, either. I have at least two CDs that I bought in the 90's that deteriorated. The reflective layer turned black in spots big enough to render playback pretty much impossible. I have also seen one CD delaminate. I wouldn't cast my lot with optical disc.

    • A different post on Paperback (software to create a computer readable binary dump on paper) got me to thinking, shy not store the actual video images on paper directly?

      There are lots of ways to make a flip book [google.com], and how to print on paper for long term storage is pretty well known.

      You may argue this is the same as film, but I see it as a slightly more sure option - film itself is not all that stable and degrades over time. An actual dump of all film images to paper would be the ultimate backup should other

    • perhaps include paper in the capsule with C code printed out for a decoder.

      C code? What's that and how do I convert it to Javascript?

  • But I would also put it on an "archival" DVD and track down a decent quality portable DVD player and rig it up to run on D-cells.

    Film's a "worst-case" medium, but a digital copy stands a reasonably good chance of being useful.

  • ... that shit never dies.

  • Name it uniquely (Score:5, Funny)

    by hawguy ( 1600213 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @02:23PM (#49226879)

    When you upload it to your computer, give it a unique filename (a GUID [guidgenerator.com] would be good), then leave a note in the time capsule instructing them to ask the NSA to recover a copy of the file from their archives.

  • film and flip and digital and whatever you have. include instructions.

  • Digital only works if you are proactively transferring it from one generation of storage to another. Once you have skipped 2 or 3 generations of storage then it becomes (exponentially) harder to find hardware/software that will read your data. Extend that over 100 years of media evolution and you will be screwed in the future trying to read todays standards.

    (And if you say "keep it on the cloud", then that only works as longs someone is paying the bills and the company stays in business)

    As an example, loo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
      not just digital. getting ones hands on a functional betamax player would be quite a pain in the arse.

  • What are the stats/predictions these days as to how long a flash drive will last? If you had a quality flash drive you could stick it in the time capsule along with netbook or some other small sized player. It doesn't seem that unreasonable for our grid to still be on 120V in 100 years.

  • 50 years ago digital information was typically stored on punch cards and paper tape. Those might still be readable with great care and tedious effort but would almost certainly be in no condition to be fed into vintage equipment. Someone would probably need to transcribe them optically and run them into some sort of interpreter.

    100 years ago there were no computers as we know them today.

    Original film from those eras still exists and is readable. While somebody might be able to dig up an ancient optical d

    • 100 years ago there were tabulators, punch card driven. BTW, I have 40+ year old punched card decks that are fine; there are popular scripting language programs that can construct the record from scanned image

      • Oh, I don't doubt we can still read them, I'm only saying it's a fairly tedious effort and some care needs to be taken in storing the cards so they last long enough. With punch cards, a camera or a scanner can be a makeshift "punch card reader."

        How will someone 50-100 years in the future read one of today's optical discs without a working compatible drive? Microscopes and a lot of time?

        • maybe they can work from 3D high res image of disk, if digital computing still around. It may not be, we might bio-engineer our "computers" to be nerves and supporting tissue. Makes sense to me, why have a need for multi-billion dollar manufacturing plants when soil and sunlight could be used to make things instead. Growing our houses, clothes, "vehicles"....

  • Upload it to the pirate bay as porn.zip.

  • I see these 3 dimensional images etched deep in plastic cubes via lasers, for sale in novelty stores. I wonder if something like this technique can be used to burn a pattern in a solid block of something (plastic or crystal) that could be read later (by lasers, I guess) and converted back into the original data -- which could easily be video. I'd actually be a little surprised if something like this didn't already exist. The result should have a very long shelf life, sufficient for a time capsule. There

  • We know for a fact, clay tablets with wedges used for writing will last several thousand years. If the material is interesting enough the future generation will legions of college professors and graduate students to decode it. If it is not, it is not worth preserving.
  • Think back to 1965. What media do you still have that you can access? Paper, and analog hardcopy LP's maybe. LP, only if you still have a working player.

    1975? Same
    1985? Floppy disks. How many of those do you have that are still readable? And on what device? Gen 1 CD. Probably all toast.
    1995? Gen 1 DVD. Again, probably toast.

    Meanwhile, while cleaning out my parents house, a photo album, with pics of my grandmother partying in a club in Harlem in the '30s, is perfectly, instantly, readable.

    Film, or pap

    • There are programs on the web for constructing the music (badly) from a scanned image of your LP.

    • 1965? Paper. Analog LPs. Reel-to-reel tape (if you can find a tape player; they're around but hard to find). Some really old audio Compact Cassettes (for which players are still easy to find). But most importantly... motion picture film and still photos on film and photographic paper.

      Even if you didn't have a projector, you could look at a movie film and see what it was about. You could fashion a projector, or scan the images and assemble them digitally. Film is pretty cool that way.

  • Time Capsule (Score:3)

    by ArcadeMan ( 2766669 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @03:22PM (#49227385)

    Put the video on an Apple Time Capsule [wikipedia.org] and put it inside the Time Capsule.

    I don't care if it works or not, just do it to confuse the people who will be digging it up in 50 or 100 years.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bo'Bob'O ( 95398 )

      I know this was in jest, but it might not be quite as crazy as it sounds. If there is any electronic interface format that we are using today that will outlast the rest, and maintain backwards compatibility, it's going to be Ethernet. So while there likely won't be any equipment directly compatible, there would probably still be some around and operational. Consider the systems that run B52s, for instance.

      So if there is space to spare besides the obvious choice of film, some sort of NAS device could be an o

      • I know this was in jest, but it might not be quite as crazy as it sounds. If there is any electronic interface format that we are using today that will outlast the rest, and maintain backwards compatibility, it's going to be Ethernet. So while there likely won't be any equipment directly compatible, there would probably still be some around and operational. Consider the systems that run B52s, for instance.

        So if there is space to spare besides the obvious choice of film, some sort of NAS device could be an option, and itself an interesting thing to find in a time capsule.

        Going forward Ethernet does have a good chance (RJ45 10-Base-T dates to 1990, yet is very much still current), and more and more embedded devices include an Ethernet connection, and unlike USB (aside from certain classes) doesn't require special drivers.

        To it's credit, RS-232 is 53 years old and still accessible. My new Haswell based desktop has a pin header on the motherboard, and USB-converters are a dime a dozen. Connecting to legacy equipment at work, RS-232 has the best support. A lot of equipment inte

        • Something else, RS-232 is a very simple. Plug a scope into it and you can figure it out pretty quick. The digital equivalent of "hold the film up to the light and look in a magnifying glass"

          • I think the digital equivalent of "hold the film up to the light and look in a magnifying glass" is punched tape.

  • Looks like one of few digital media that might survive [wikipedia.org]. Apparently if you want film to last this long you'd better make separate black and white recordings [kodak.com] of the RGB channels, since the color dyes are much less stable and probably won't last more than like 30 years (methods B-D).

    Method A: Let's begin with extended life expectancy records-those film documents that need to last for a very long time. Nothing can last forever, but hundreds of years or longer is possible. Color originals should be made on high-quality camera-color-negative film such as EASTMAN EXR Color Negative Film, having a set of properly exposed and processed black-and-white separation positives made for the red, green, and blue records onto EASTMAN Panchromatic Separation Film on ESTAR Base. Then you should store the original negative and separation positives and the master positive and duplicate negative, that were made from the original negative, at the keeping conditions specified earlier.

    • In the cool and dark, colour film will last a long time - my earliest colour photos were taken in the 1970s and 1980s and are still doing well. It's a pity we lost Kodachrome; it's probably good for a century. But we did lose it.

      That having been said, separate black and white rolls each shot with a different colour channel would be very archival. If correctly processed and kept dry and cool, they are probably good for 100-200 years minimum.

  • Like Voyager's golden record? (Score:3)

    by sbaker ( 47485 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @04:07PM (#49227737) Homepage

    100 years isn't so long. They people who open the container will almost certainly be able to read instructions - and probably have reasonable technology to access the contents. But maybe they don't care enough to go to a lot of trouble to do it? It's very likely that the images you store will still be easily accessible in the future.

    If you don't think they'll go to very much trouble - then you should provide them with the means to replay the data as well as the data itself. There are plenty of small video players (like a cheap digital camera or an MP3 player with video capability) - so long as you pack them appropriately and protect them from crazy temperature variations, they should last a long time in storage and still work at the end. Provide written instructions on what power requirements the machine has - and what buttons to push to access the content.

    But quite honestly - there is unlikely to be anything in the data you provide that won't be accessible by then.

    I would stick with physical objects that would be of historical interest, personal items - a snapshot of the times when the capsule was buried.

    Maybe it would be worth trying to find people who've opened capsules like this - and ask them what was found to be most valuable from the contents?

        -- Steve

    • But quite honestly - there is unlikely to be anything in the data you provide that won't be accessible by then.

      You would think so, but the situations are gradually getting worse and worse. We are not at a time where technology is developing and evolving rapidly. I can already not play my 16bit DOS games on a modern computer without fancy emulation and that is less than 20 years. NASA themselves have had issues with recovering data from moon landings and other missions that have been kept in storage. Then take into account proprietary codecs. Just think back 15 years ago where everything online was Realmedia, what ma

    • If you don't think they'll go to very much trouble - then you should provide them with the means to replay the data as well as the data itself. There are plenty of small video players (like a cheap digital camera or an MP3 player with video capability) - so long as you pack them appropriately and protect them from crazy temperature variations, they should last a long time in storage and still work at the end. Provide written instructions on what power requirements the machine has - and what buttons to push to access the content.

      This is what I was going to suggest. Portable DVD player with a few different DVDs of different brands (in case one uses some kind of corrosive label or something) and vacuum seal it all with some moisture absorbing packs. Take the battery out of the thing and make sure there are some instructions about what kind of input power it needs.

  • I seem to remember reading about something like this in a scifi novel years ago. An alien race had set up an automated broadcast that was transmitted to the galaxy at large every century or something like that. The broadcast was a digital signal that clearly broke into bytes of some arbitrary length that I don't recall. Each group of three bytes expressed an X and Y coordinate and a value for color on a grayscale. The coordinates for X and Y ranged from zero to some prime number and progressed in a manner c

  • No, seriously. It is a technology based on vinyl records, instead of encoding audio it encodes video as well - on an analogue groove track. Given a stable enough substrate - platinum base with a gold electroplating for instance, such as on the Voyager records - it'll last practically forever.

  • Electrolysis can destroy any metal. Stray currents coupled with soil humidity can result in corrosion. I'm not a "Time Capsule" designer, but I think the SS can ought to go in a very thick Polyethylene container that is spin welded closed and leak checked.

  • Get some archival-grade DVD or Blu-ray media and then include one of those little portable DVD players (with a wall plug). Include a few extra pure-digital formats like theora, mp4, etc on separate media, just in case. Put it in a separate airtight container and make sure to include lots of silica gel.
  • real pressed CD-ROM (not CD-R) with an MPEG-2 video file

    the CD-ROM standard is 30 years old already, and the MPEG-2 standard is 20 years old. both will be obtainable without too much difficulty in 100 years, assuming no catastrophic global upheaval but if WWIII & WWIV happen nobody is going to care about your time capsule

  • It's low-tech, but... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ninjagin ( 631183 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @05:59PM (#49228731)
    ... how about some flip-books?

  • Update (Score:3)

    by dwywit ( 1109409 ) on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @07:28PM (#49229531)

    While I was waiting to see if this would make the front page, I called a post-production business based at the Village Roadshow studios on the Gold Coast http://www.movieworldstudios.c... [movieworldstudios.com.au]
    and asked them about a transfer from video to film.

    No-one does it in Australia. Lots of people doing film to video, but apparently I would need to send it to Technicolor in Thailand for a video-to-film transfer. And it would cost a lot more than the budget for the event. They suggested storage on multiple formats from Kodak Gold discs to USB memory sticks, using open-source codecs, with the codec whitepaper included.

    There's always the cheap film-to-video method - project your film on a screen and point a video camera at it, but do it in reverse, i.e. point a film camera at my LCD monitor. I've got a super 8 camera, but it's silent, so the audio would have to be recorded separately.

    I also got a look at the capsule - it's got about 1 or perhaps 2 cubic feet of storage, so it's not going to cope with more than a few minutes of film reels, having to compete with whatever else goes in. I'll add a DVD and a USB stick with some instructions.

    As it's not going to be a surprise for those who open the capsule (copies of footage are going to the state library and anyone who wants a copy on DVD), I think I'll contact the National Film & Sound Archive http://www.nfsa.gov.au/ [nfsa.gov.au] and ask them to store a copy, then include a nice letter in the capsule: "Would you like to see a movie of this? Ask at the Qld State Library or the National Film & Sound Archive."

    Heh - captcha is "paranoia"

  • Chisel a bunch of zeros and ones into blocks of concrete with codec instructions in text. For a 1 MB video, you need 8 million bits or so (without audio), giving about 72 square meters of concrete if you use 3 mm cells. They'd love you for it.

  • Its my understanding that Laserdisc, the once fringe format that was usurped by DVD, differed in that, instead of a codec that recorded deviations from the previous frame, stored each and every video frame on the disc. I would think this might make for the best method to retrieve the information. To be sure, you could include the entire patent library for the laserdisc technology to ensure accurate reproduction in 100yrs time.

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