SUNScholar/Digitisation/Digital Formats/Closed

Back to Digital Formats

Common Closed Digital Formats (To be avoided at all costs)

Open Formats Advocacy
Please check the following websites for more information about using open digital format standards and the movement to support this:
 * http://defendinnovation.org
 * http://patentabsurdity.com
 * http://en.swpat.org

Documents
All the Microsoft document formats are closed.

This is a huge problem for repository preservation.
 * http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/intro/intro.shtml
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Office_Open_XML_and_OpenDocument

Multimedia
All the Microsoft media formats are closed.

This is a huge problem for repository preservation.
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Audio
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Media_Video

Other closed media formats

 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Open_formats_closed_by_software_patents
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3 (Lossy audio codec, many patent trolls)
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding (Lossy audio codec, many patent trolls)
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpeg4 (Lossy video codec, many patent trolls)
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jpeg (Lossy image codec, many patent trolls)
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_Image_File_Format (Lossless image codec, many patent trolls)
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video (Closed format multimedia container, many patent trolls)

Conversion Tools

 * https://gist.github.com/Vestride/278e13915894821e1d6f