Future proofing digital videos - Your best bets

[Wyntha]

Here's the scenario. It's 2020 and my yet to be born grandchildren are messing around in the attic. They find an old shoe-box filled with CD-Rs dating from 1999 & 2000. They discover that these contain old family digital movies captured and edited under Windows and converted and saved on the CD-R.
They take them to their PC and find they can still play them. What's more they find that they are able to re-edit and convert them to the video technology of the day.

Here's the question. What format did the CD have, what format we're the video's stored in and what codec's were used in 1999 and 2000 that allow my grandkids to do what they did? No prizes but all views welcomed?

[Elie]

Put all your video's on mini DV tapes.
Becuase it is digital I think camera's of the future will still be able to read the format, hey even if the technology changes drastically I'm pretty sure they can find an old VX1000 or XL1 for a few hundred dollars and be able to watch all those videos as if they were recorded yesterday

All photo's can be saved in any format like BMP's and Jpeg's (I think they're here to stay) you can put them on a Photo CD and your set.

Cheers,
Elie

[jeff b]

Judging by the fact that the first 8mm portable system I had a chance to play with was in the early 1980's, and that's still a rampantly popular format for camcorders today (shows little signs of slowing down anytime soon), I'd say that mini-dv will probably be easily available in another twenty years. For discs, though, the horizon seems to show that glimmering DVD format stretching off into the future with MPEG-2. It's still a bit pricey, though.

The trouble with trying to preserve that old home movie stuff is that eventually you're going to have to convert it to some new format. This happened with all the 8mm and super8 film my grandfather shot in the 1950's and 1960's, and which my mother held onto all those years. We finally got all that stuff transferred to VHS and distributed it amongst all the family. When I got a mini-DV camcorder, the first thing I did was to capture it all onto that format, then upload it to mini-dv files that I've saved onto CD-R's.

I'm expecting that someday in the not so distant future, I'll be able to finally archive my things onto DVD without mortgaging the house. Meanwhile, it's mini-DV files saved on CD-R's.

[Maximilian]

I think, this is a very interesting question. My experience showed that every 10 to 20 years there has been a completely change in recording material. In the 50s I bought 78rpm shellac records, in the 60s I bought 45rpm and 33rpm vinyl records, in the 70s I recorded to tape with 19cm/s and 26 cm diameter tapes, in the 90s I completely digitalised my archive to 44 kHz stereo wav files. My tape deck has gone defect and the needles of my phonograph cartridge are weared. But for all that I enjoy my old records on audio CDs.

Concerning video I started 1996 with a miro card and making indeo 4 files in 384x288, 25 fps. These files can be played up to now. Early 1998 I bought a RRS/Mil2. The dmb1 files created by the 2.0 driver can only be played with special hardware, so this is not the format of the future. This may not be true for the new Matrox MJPEG codex. However, I beleave that the MPEG2 file system can even be played with 64bit computers and Windows 2030 on 3 GHz computers in the future. So my answer is easy. I propose
Indeo 5
MPEG2
MJPEG (maybe)

[miker]

here's my 2p:

Use MPEG 1 or 2 on ISO compliant disc format.
Imagine if DVD couldn't read CD!! It is ISO standards that try to standardise. Of course, in 5 years we may find that all but solid-state nanotech is obsolete!!!

Personally, I prefer hard-copy photo -- no need to plug them in!!!