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Comment by llarsson | Hacker News Reader

That "some" proprietary formats from the 80's and 90's are still readable is already causing real problems: because not *all* are. So text, possibly with Markdown or similar hints regarding emphasis and structure, is still vastly better than any alternative I can think of.

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I bumped into this recently with a couple Kodak PhotoCDs I uncovered last month. Trying to get the pictures out of the PCD files is turning out to be more challenging than I expected.

Is ImageMagick not doing the job? It's been a while, but Photoshop used to be pretty adept at this as well.

I haven't checked ImageMagick to see if it supports PCD, I'll have to see if I can do it in my wife's PhotoShop license.

And ImageMagick will only do the lowest resolution images from the files.

I converted mine years ago using iPhoto but according to Wikipedia, there are several programs that can do the conversion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_CD#Converting_Photo_CD_i...

iPhoto no longer exists and the replacement, Photos doesn't support it. A free command-line tool I found doesn't run any without signing and I need to find the dependent library for JPEG handling to use it. Other apps are paid.

And an online service that claims to do it only extracts the lowest resolution scan from the file.

what was the issue - hardware access (a CD reader), bit rot or else?

The image format was jpeg if I remember correctly, wasn't it?

I don't think it was JPEG, it was a custom format that contained multiple resolutions.

It's a custom undocumented format with a lot of oddities to it (particularly in its color profile handling, or more precisely lack thereof).

Additionally the option to (relatively) easily transform markdown or richtext to another format is a great when you want to try a new tool and/or format.

That's the real secret, I think, keeping content up to date. Text isn't the only medium that can be treated that way, too. My family converted lots of analog audio and video tapes to DVD some years ago, and I immediately turned around and ripped them to digital, lossless types and stored them on a few hard drives and eventually a cloud backup. Will FLAC and MP4 last forever? Nope, probably not, but if I check in on these files every few years, update the players that I've saved (VLC), and periodically convert them to newer formats, I feel comfortable that my grandchildren will be able to hear their great-great-grandparents' road trip to California, or see video of my bar mitzvah on whatever screen they're using years from now.

Nitpick - DVD is digital. When you said "digital", you probably meant "computer file based" format, as opposed to a physical disc format.

Yup. Or .org for that matter,

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