Hippies from Hell
hippies.waag.org
hippies.waag.org
Seeing Emmanuel Goldstein being followed around by like 20 people(Seeing those 20 people follow him right up to the outdoor urinal then stand around awkwardly waiting for him to finish). Sitting in the back of the room watching him introduce a documentary about Phiber Optik then looking to my left and realizing he was sitting right next to me. Gosh I could go on for hours. Such a great experience.
What codec should they have used back in 2003?
This is an industrial problem in the film world. Celluloid film keeps remarkably well in moderately good conditions (cool and dry), and more importantly it's so standardized that you can load a decades-old film into a new projector and it will just play back correctly. The Academy standard for 35mm film has been in place since 1932 for example, and specifies everything down to the shape of the little holes on the side: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_perforations
Digital video archival is a nightmare. Although the physical storage media problems are now going away thanks to cloud services and suchlike, there isn't yet an established standard for picture storage - the main contenders are MXF and Adobe's Cinema DNG.
They haven't updated that page, presumably since it was created over 10 years ago. That's why.
Because it works, and transcoding would lose even more quality?
Digital video archival is a nightmare. Although the physical storage media problems are now going away thanks to cloud services and suchlike, there isn't yet an established standard for picture storage
MPEG, H.264, etc. are not standards?
Sure. Are they still going to be the relevant useful standards 40-50 years from now? Will software/hardware for working with them still be readily available? Will the storage media be in as good condition as film would be?
Most "classic" movies are at least that old, and many are decades older than that. Archiving and preserving them requires something other than the flavor-of-the-decade codec.
Well, my computer can still decode wav files, and that format is close to 25 years old now. What does it matter if the standards now aren't "useful" standards in the future? Why would projects such as VLC (which plays pretty much every format that has ever been created), etc. go away?
In 40-50 years from now we might not be creating new content in those formats, but the fact that they're official standards and there's plenty of source code around for decoding/encoding them means that they'll remain usable as long as general purpose computers continue to exist. (This is an actual real concern now, given the proliferation of DRM'd formats and proprietary restricted systems.)
Will the storage media be in as good condition as film would be?
Longevity of storage media is a slightly different and independent issue from file format, and one that could be applied to many other things; but as long as the original bits survive in some form or other, either through storage on long-term media or repeated copying, it won't vanish.
Are you aware that probably 1 billion TV's can decode it? If there is ever a codec that can be called a "forever codec" it's MPEG. (MPEG-2 to be specific.)
H.264 support is not far behind.
It's only getting easier, not harder, to support every video format ever made.
And what is the expected lifetime of those billion TVs?
Let's talk again in 30 years and see if MPEG-2 and H.264 are "forever codecs" with widespread easy support then.
The point is that the codec is so widespread, used in so many places, there is zero chance it will ever not be supported.