SUNScholar/Digitisation/Digital Formats
Contents
Digital Format Registry
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
Electronic Metadata Schemas
- http://wiki.lib.sun.ac.za/index.php/SUNScholar/Metadata
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OASIS_(organization)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronom
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoded_Archival_Description
Digital Formats Extra Information
Click on the heading above.
Common Closed Digital Formats (To be avoided at all costs)
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.
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)
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