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Microsoft and Warner Bros. Archived the Original 'Superman' Movie on a Futuristic Glass Disc (variety.com) 93

Posted by msmash from the pushing-the-limits dept.
Microsoft has teamed up with Warner Bros. to text. The collaboration, which was unveiled at Microsoft's Ignite 2019 conference in Orlando, Florida Monday, is a first test case for a new storage technology that could eventually help safeguard Hollywood's movies and TV shows, as well as many other forms of data, for centuries to come. From a report: "Glass has a very, very long lifetime," said Microsoft Research principal researcher Ant Rowstron in a recent conversation with Variety. "Thousands of years." The piece of silica glass storing the 1978 "Superman" movie, measures 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm x 2 mm. The glass contains 75.6 GB of data plus error redundancy codes. Microsoft began to investigate glass as a storage medium in 2016 in partnership with the University of Southampton Optoelectonics Research Centre. The goal of these efforts, dubbed "Project Silica," is to find a new storage medium optimized for what industry insiders like to call cold data -- the type of data you likely won't need to access for months, years, or even decades. It's data that doesn't need to sit on a server, ready to be used 24/7, but that is kept in a vault, away from anything that could corrupt it.

Turns out that Warner Bros. has quite a bit of this kind of cold data. Founded in the 1920s, the studio has been safekeeping original celluloid film reels, audio from 1940s radio shows and much more, for decades. Think classics like "Casablanca," "The Wizard of Oz" or "Looney Tunes" cartoons. "Our mission is to preserve those original assets in perpetuity," said Brad Collar, who is leading these efforts at Warner Bros. as the studio's senior vice president of global archives and media engineering. And while the studio is deeply invested in these classics, it also keeps adding an ever-increasing number of modern assets to its archives, ranging from digitally-shot films and television episodes to newer forms of entertainment, including video games. To date, the Warner Bros. archive contains some 20 million assets, with tens of thousands of new items being added every year. Each of them is being stored in multiple locations, explained Collar. "We want to have more than one copy."
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Microsoft and Warner Bros. Archived the Original 'Superman' Movie on a Futuristic Glass Disc More

Microsoft and Warner Bros. Archived the Original 'Superman' Movie on a Futuristic Glass Disc

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  • Don't find out the hard way like this guy did [youtube.com]

    • Don't drop it...

      No worries, they can just download a pristine copy from The Pirate Bay.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You jest, but if the movie studio uploaded a near-perfect copy onto The Pirate Bay, it would probably stay seeded for a very very long time. Especially if they promised not to sue the people who were seeding .....

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • what about the readers and the decoders?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cirby ( 2599 )

      You just need a suitably-powerful optical magnifier and a digital reader, and if a future civilization can't make those, then they probably won't need to read those files, will they?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

        Future generations will find the vault and assume it's some weird rich guy's really large coaster collection.

      • Re:what about the readers and the decoders? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Monday November 04, 2019 @12:25PM (#59379104)

        The real problem is knowing how to interpret the data once you read it. Take for example trying to read disk packs from a 1980s Cray https://www.chrisfenton.com/cr... [chrisfenton.com]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cirby ( 2599 )

          The solution for that is including a number of "HOW TO READ THESE ARCHIVES" notes around, starting with easy-to-read text, and then working your way down. Build the archive structure so they have to see the "README" tablets first.

          "If you can read this, the next tablet can only be readable with a basic magnifying device. The one after that needs a microscope (instructions on how to build are included). The next tablet includes instructions on how to read the actual archives."

          You also need to make sure to inc

          • Of course, this all assumes that civilization will completely collapse, and all tech above zero is lost. History shows that this doesn't happen in real life

            Citation needed.

            Seems to me there is strong evidence of being reset to zero, that is only now being uncovered in places like Turkey (Göbekli Tepe). Advanced stone work from 12000 years ago, predates what we once considered to be the birth of writing, which apparently was merely the most recent birth of writing (5200 years ago.)

      • Data needs to be moving.
        Digital Data has some interesting aspects primarily It can be copied exactly
        So unlike traditional analog data on Paper, Stones etc... The more the data is read and copied the more reliable the data is. As Paper, Stone etc... will degrade over time. Glass storage is the digital equivalent of etching it in stone. For the case if the data will not be copied and shared, then it can be held for a long time. But if the media stays popular and it is shared and copied then it will outlast
        • Ever hear of bit rot? Google it because you are just so incredibly wrong here.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by djbckr ( 673156 )
            I think you are incredibly missing the point here. If the "data is moving", then there are copies of it (lots of redundancy) and you don't need these glass things.
        • Not if you preserve it, which is the point of this exercise. Seriously have you not seen how long stone tablets and papyrus last? And if you take care to store it, it will last indefinitely.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Do like the Long-Now's Rosetta project did - start off with eye-readable info that get progressively smaller - thereby focusing attention to the magnification needed to 'read' the data.

      As a component to the archive's metadata you also place decode info on each disc. If you're encoding 3-color separated images, the algorithm to read the grayscale image data, along with the device independent color space info (e.g. CIE L*a*b). Similar info for the audio tracks.

      I mean, if you have (eventually) 1-TB+ per opti

  • What do they mean by the "original" Superman movie? The 1948?

    https://www.imdb.com/find?q=Su... [imdb.com]

  • I really would have thought they'd pick something else. Granted it's a nice movie but jeez. Citizen Kane? Casablanca? It's a Wonderful Life? Battleship Potemkin?

    And since when is a square called a disc? Doesn't "disc" imply circular?
  • A future civilization will find a vault. Build a decoder. The first thing they'll play will be "I Love Lucy".

    • ... The first thing they'll play will be "I Love Lucy".

      Followed by "Friends", "Seinfeld", "Sex in the City" and "Wheel of Fortune".

    • And then they'll build rockets to go to the moon. Or at the very least, a fist-powered launcher of some kind.

  • Expedition to Earth by Arthur C Clarke

  • M-Disc? (Score:3, Informative)

    by NoMoreACs ( 6161580 ) on Monday November 04, 2019 @12:42PM (#59379248)

    What's wrong with the M-Disc format?

    It is available in DVD and BD formats, in several capacities, and from several manufacturers. M-Disc Burners (which also burn conventional Organic-dye optical media) are also available from several OEMs.

    M-Disc media looks like it will last over a thousand years (hence the "M"), when stored in office-environment-like conditions, and is readable in bog-standard CD/BD players.

    Yes, there won't be any DVD/BD players in a hundred years, let alone a thousand; but when that starts to be an issue, at least the source will still be readable to transfer to the next popular format.

    https://www.pcworld.com/articl... [pcworld.com]

    • M-Disc media looks like it will last over a thousand years (hence the "M"), when stored in office-environment-like conditions

      So did CDs and LaserDiscs for the first 20 years, then disc rot started happening.
      Hopefully Project Silica media is monolithic.

  • It's been the next generation storage technology for 15 years and counting.

  • Makes sense, since Microsoft and Warner Bros are run by supervillains. ;)

  • Drop it into public domain, as it ought to be. Somebody with a large hard disk will mirror it.

    What's the use of common culture goods if they under the lock of artificial scarcity for centuries? That was never the deal.

    For all I care, Casablanca and Superman can disappear in a fire, like most of the rest of (valuable) works will anyway, not being popular enough to make it above the glass disk bar.

    • Most of those movies should trickle into the public domain by the late 21st Century, unless another Disney copyright extension happens. Until then, we need something like this. Remember the fire at Universal that destroyed a lot of irreplaceable master tapes.

      • Should have already, if Disney hadn't come along earlier.

        But they came along, and lawmakers did their bidding. Repeatedly. What makes you believe they'll stop, ever?

  • It's rather funny to hear of Microsoft talking about this sort of thing - technology that can be used thousands of years into the future. After all, they're constantly reinventing everything. And like everything else microsoft, the structure of the glass, the shape of the glass, the size of the glass, the thickness of the glass, the color of the glass, the machine that reads the glass, the operating system required to run on said machine... all of these things will constantly change as needed to monopoliz

    • All good points, but the biggest point is that while the data might be stable for a millennium, the ability to extract and understand it won't be. That's a fundamental problem with digital data: it's not readable without a machine to decode it and translate it to something that's understandable by a human (or other species). So finding a millennium-stable storage medium is good, if it's also impervious to the slings and arrows of storage buildings and filling cabinets and fires (like the one that destroyed

  • "Microsoft has teamed up with Warner Bros. to text."

    What does that have to do with the rest of the summary/article? Teamed up to text?

  • Microsoft and Warner Bros. Archived the Original 'Superman' Movie on a Futuristic Glass Disc

    Now do the original Star Wars.

  • And discover we could fly, how cool is that?

  • "Our mission is to preserve those original assets in perpetuity"

    But of course it is. As Universal learned when it was discovered they hid that they let irreplaceable master recordings going back to the beginning of recorded music burn, if you don't have the masters, it's legal grey area if you actually own the "assets"

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... [nytimes.com]

  • I seem to remember that conventional glass is technically a liquid state, it just has a very very slow flow rate. Hence glass windows that are hundreds of years old are thicker at the bottom than the top.

    So stacking the glass disks vertically may not be advisable if the goal is "thousands of years". They'd need to stack flat, and even then, I'd expect the diameter of the disk to get fractionally larger over geological periods of time.

    The rules change when we're talking about *real* time periods.

    • Re:How are they storing it? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Chaset ( 552418 ) on Monday November 04, 2019 @04:23PM (#59380356) Homepage Journal

      The glass flows slowly/window thicker at the bottom thing is a myth. My middle school science teacher told me that one back in the day, too. However, with the power of the internet today, you can find out for yourself. Glass, and especially glass that they would pick for this purpose, is unlikely to change shape in the time frames they are targeting.

      • I did the research, and you are correct. Wow, my high school physics teacher believed this. What other things did he tell us that aren't true? (Is gravity real?)

  • Consumers have been saying that for years. They're called backups. And you've fought us for years over letting us have the rights to do so. Just sayin'. ;)

    • Rights are not given. Rights exist independently of what someone else says. What you are referring to as "rights" granted by your overlords are privileges (or licenses). In order to hold the belief that someone else can grant you privileges and license requires that first you promote that other to master and denigrate yourself to the status of chattel -- that you grant them superiority and authority over you. Why would you do that?

      • Because some of us think past advanced placement high school English and deal with the real world.

  • Not that historical movies aren't important but I sort of wonder if years from now it isn't misinterpreted as people of our era had some weird beliefs in some really weird gods. I'd much prefer them store things like fossil records or at least things that make us look smarter.

  • If it's not talking rings [youtube.com], I'm not interested.

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