SUNScholar/Digitisation/Digital Formats

Digital Format Registry

• http://www.udfr.org
• http://www.gdfr.info

Types of digital formats and codecs

• For documents refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_OpenDocument_software and http://www.pdfa.org.
• For audio refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_codecs and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Lossless_Audio_Codec
• For video refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_codecs and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(codec)
• For images refer to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_file_formats and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_image

Common Closed Digital Formats

See: http://patentabsurdity.com and http://en.swpat.org

Documents

All the Microsoft document formats are closed.

This is a huge problem for digital 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 digital 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)

Multimedia

Converter software

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFF

Open Codecs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_codecs

Audio

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_codecs

Video

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_codecs

Images

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_graphics_file_formats

Container Formats

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_container_formats

Documents

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Document_Foundation
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Document

Comments

Dear Hilton,

I would advise that you adopt open (i.e. non-propriety) standards, as these have the best chance of remaining readable in the long-term future.
Propriety formats are dependent on the continuing existence of the firm who markets them, as well as the continued support by this firm, even if they continue to exist.
This is in my opinion very risky.

For documents I am aware of an ISO standard that is targeted at archival, known as PDF/A (see www.pdfa.org).

For audio and video the situation is less developed, and there are as far as I know no standards specifically for archival.
In both cases I would recommend that data be saved without lossy compression, and again that open standards be sought.
Hence mp3 and WMV should be avoided, both because they are based on lossy  compression and are are propriety.
The audio format FLAC on the other hand is open and does not employ lossy compression.

I hope this is of help,
Best regards,
Thomas Niesler.

------------------------------------------------
Prof. Thomas Niesler
Digital Signal Processing Group
Department of Electronic Engineering
University of Stellenbosch
Private Bag X1, Stellenbosch 7602, South Africa
Phone: +27 21 8084118
Fax:   +27 21 8084981
Email: trn@dsp.sun.ac.za

Microfiche

• http://www.fctec.co.za

Software

• http://www.fsf.org and http://www.opensource.org

Data Sets

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sql
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_relational_database_management_systems
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_database_tools

Engineering drawings

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDWG

Metadata

Click on the heading above.

Language

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langauge_codes
• http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php

Back to IR Help