H.264 for preservation

[Misty De Meo]

Hi all,

I had a user inquiring about the use of H.264 as a preservation format. Is anyone aware of institutions archiving video in H.264 using its intraframe, lossless compression profile? The user suggested that this could provide a significant storage savings compared to MJPEG2000.

Thanks,

Misty

Misty De Meo

Digital Collections Technician | Technicienne des collections numériques

Canadian Museum for Human Rights | Musée canadien des droits de la personne

E-mail / Courriel: misty....@humanrightsmuseum.ca

269 rue Main Street

Winnipeg, MB

R3C 1B3

[Manojlovich, Slavko]

Misty
I tend to agree with Library and Archives Canada that MJPEG2000 should be the digital video long-term preservation format and use H.264 derivatives for your access format. Also, you may want to reconsider the use of H.264 given Google's recent announcement that it was going to drop support for it in Chrome.

Slavko Manojlovich
Manager, Digital Archives Initiative
Memorial University of Newfoundland

________________________________

Hi all,

Thanks,
Misty

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[Manojlovich, Slavko]

 

Sorry, I neglected to include the link to Google Chrome and H.264

 

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/11/google-will-drop-h-264-support-from-chrome-herd-the-masses-towa/

 

Slavko

---

From: Manojlovich, Slavko
Sent: Tue 2/1/2011 5:19 PM
To: archiv...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [archivematica] H.264 for preservation

[Manojlovich, Slavko]

The day after I sent the email about Google Chrome we have this announcement from Microsoft:

 

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsoft-adds-h264-support-to-google-chrome/2937

 

There are lessons to be learned from this quick succession of events. H.264 is a risky long term preservation format. Better start with MOVIE JPEG2000 and generate access copies using the video format flavour of the day.

 

Slavko Manojlovich

Memorial University of Newfoundland

---

From: Manojlovich, Slavko
Sent: Tue 2/1/2011 5:39 PM

[Misty De Meo]

Thanks, Slavko. However, I'm not sure that Chrome dropping H.264 is really relevant to digital preservation. It's more about public access to streaming video via HTML5. After all, MJPEG2000 was never supported by any web browser, and rarely by user-end video players. That's not indicative of the long-term standing of either format.

What is the technical reason that MJPEG2000 is preferred? I'm aware that MJPEG2000 is being considered for adoption for a few organizations (LOC, LAC) and that improves its standing from a professional standard perspective. I know that MJPEG2000 is an ISO standard, but so as far as I can tell is H.264.

Misty

Misty De Meo

Digital Collections Technician | Technicienne des collections numériques

Canadian Museum for Human Rights | Musée canadien des droits de la personne

E-mail / Courriel: misty....@humanrightsmuseum.ca

269 rue Main Street

Winnipeg, MB

R3C 1B3

[Manojlovich, Slavko]

I am leaving the identification of long-term preservation digital formats to the experts like the folks at LAC and the PLANETS community. Technical justification for MJPEG200 is provided here:

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/digital-initiatives/012018-2220.03-e.html

with the rationale and evaluation criteria provided here:
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/012018/f2/012018-2200-e.pdf

End-user support and adoption is not a major factor which is why we generate access formats to serve the flavour of the day. I don't think you can get away from having at least 2 and possibly three formats for each digital object:

original format / long-term preservation format / current access format

Slavko