Recommended Target Formats for Video Preservation

While there is near universal agreement on target file formats and resolution for audio, there remains wide disagreement on what to do for video. Yet obsolescence and deterioration progress rapidly for video, too. Many professionals advocate the lossless JPEG2000 in an MXF wrapper as an open-source “ever green” format for video preservation. At this time, specifications are incomplete and interoperability highly problematic between different vendor implementations of lossless J2K/MXF. At the request of the Library of Congress, George Blood wrote a white paper that makes recommendations for alternatives to J2K/MXF. The recommendations take into account the wide heterogeneity of video and the desire to have formats that neither lose content nor present any obstacle to future migration to J2K/MXF or any other format an institution may choose for preservation of video.