#AVpres Newsletter 2025-12-12

FFmpeg
LTO
FireWire Interface
Ferrania Film Stock
No Time to Wait
Call for Presentations/Papers
Current Releases of Software Used by Archives

1. FFmpeg

1.1. Training

In collaboration with Lichtspiel we organised a beginner course in German and French:

Einführung in FFmpeg, one-day workshop at Lichtspiel in Bern on 12 February 2026
Initiation à FFmpeg, one-day workshop at Lichtspiel in Bern on 13 February 2026

For Memoriav we organised an intermediate course in German and French:

FFmpeg-Aufbaukurs, one-day workshop at Memoriav’s premisses in Bern on 16 March 2026
Cours avancé de FFmpeg, one-day workshop at Memoriav’s premisses in Bern on 20 March 2026

And we are working also on a one-day advanced FFmpeg course for the autumn. This will possibly be held in English by Michal and Reto, and probably have webcast.

1.2. Current version

FFmpeg version 8.0.1 has been released on 2025-11-20.

An installation guide is given in the FFmpeg Cookbook for Archivists.

1.3. Coming versions

FFmpeg version 8.1 is currently planned for January or February 2026 and version 9.0 for April or May 2026.

FFmpeg 8.1 should be a long-term support (LTS) version and is supposed to be included also in the coming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. This release should also contain all the integration work of the Vulkan capabilities, which is currently done.

2. LTO

Due to popular demand, we are resuming the discussion about LTO and adding further details.

2.1. Latest generation (LTO-10)

Unfortunately with Generation 10, launched on the market last summer, the promise of backward compatibility across two generations of LTO was completely broken: LTO-10 drives can read neither LTO-8 nor LTO-9 cartridges, but only LTO-10 cartridges. Since this is the latest generation, the drives and cartridges are the most expensive.

2.2. Active generations (LTO-9, LTO-8 and LTO-7)

There is no need to switch from these generations to a more recent one.

2.3. Dying generation (LTO-6)

As the generation 6 will soon become obsolete, we recommend planning its migration in 2026 and implementing it starting in 2027.

2.4. Dead generations (LTO-5, LTO-4, LTO-3, LTO-2 and LTO-1)

The migration of the remaining LTO-5 cartridges should be carried out now, as no more LTO-5 drives are being manufactured or serviced.

Of course, generations older than 5 are no longer supported either. In addition, LTFS was introduced with LTO-5 and all older cartridges are formatted either with regular TAR or with a proprietary TAR-based format such as BRU and Retrospect. Therefore any remaining LTO-1, LTO-2, LTO-3 and LTO-4 cartridges written with a proprietary software must be migrated urgently. We will no longer offer this service from 2026.

2.5. openLTO and openLTFS

We were requested to reactivate these two projects, and the short answer is: we will not.

We don’t have plans to continue the development of openLTFS, which we stopped one year ago, after having implemented experimentally the generation 10. Please understad that we cannot continue to develop this for free. It could be that in the future we will contribute some patches to the reference implementation. Since 2021 our implementation has been at version 2.5.1 (ISO/IEC 20919:2021), while many other implementations are still at LTFS 2.4.0. Five years ago, in the Report from the Field #26 we presented a do-it-yourself LTO cartridge library based on openLTFS.

However, sometime in 2026, we may move into the Bash_AVpres package some of the Bash scripts included in the openLTO package.

3. FireWire Interface

macOS 26.0 “Tahoe” was released on 2025-09-15 (and the current version 26.1 on 2025-11-03). It no longer supports the IEEE 1394a (“FireWire 400”) and IEEE 1394b (“FireWire 800”) interfaces. Linux distributions are also removing support for FireWire, as well as Windows. Therefore, it will no longer be possible in the foreseeable future to read all metadata from DV tapes using pieces of software such as DVRescue and vrecord. We have devoted the Report from the Field #44 to this topic and we also presented the prototype for a possible solution, but we’ll not be able to continue this work before the Summer of 2026.

4. Ferrania Film Stock

Twelve years ago, we supported financially this project with a substantial sum of money, but unfortunately we were cheated. On 2025-11-08 they made new promises once again.

5. No Time to Wait

The 10^th edition of this outstanding conference will take place in Warsaw, Poland, from 14 to 16 October 2026. We have already sponsored also this edition with an amount of EUR 1000. The money comes mainly from the USD 1000 that Reto received with the 2025 SMPTE James A. Lindner Archival Technology Medal.

6. Call for Presentations/Papers

FIAF (Fédération internationale des Archives du Film) Symposium: 27–28 April 2026 at Cinémathèque marocaine in Rabat, Morocco
“Reimagining African and Arab Film Memory: Methodologies, Collaborations, Restitutions, and Dialogues”
https://www.fiafnet.org/pages/Events/2026-fiaf-symposium-call-for-papers.html
The new deadline for submissions is 19 December 2025.
SEAPAVAA (Southeast Asia-Pacific Audiovisual Archives Association) Conference: 7–11 June 2026 at the National Archives of Malaysia in Ipoh, Malaysia
“Redefining AudioVisual in Archives – Relevancy, Technology and Unity”
https://seapavaaconference.com/cfp/
The deadline for submissions is 9 January 2026.
GAVA (Global Audiovisual Archiving) Conference: 15–18 June 2026 at the Thai Film Archive in Bangkok, Thailand
“Outside of the Frame”
https://fapot.or.th/gava2026/cfp.html
The deadline for submissions is 15 February 2026.

7. Current Releases of Software Used by Archives

AEO-Light (GUI): Extraction of optical sound tracks form image digitisations with sufficient overscanning.
Version 4.4 has has been released on 2025-07-23:
https://github.com/usc-imi/aeo-light/releases/tag/v2.4
Audacity (GUI): Recording and editing sounds.
Version 3.7.5 has been released on 2025-08-05:
https://www.audacityteam.org/
Bash: Command language interpreter that executes commands read from the standard input, a string or a script file.
Version 5.3.9 has been released on 2025-12-10:
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/
DCP-o-matic (GUI): “Digital cinema democratized.” “Get any content cinema-ready.”
Version 2.18.33 has been released on 2025-11-29:
https://dcpomatic.com/
If you find this open-source software useful, you could financially support its developer, Carl Hetherington.
FFmpeg (CLI): The FFmpeg package includes three commands: a media transcoder (ffmpeg), a media metadata extractor (ffprobe) and a media player (ffplay).
Version 8.0.1 has been released on 2025-11-20:
https://ffmpeg.org/
fq (CLI): “Tool, language and decoders for working with binary data.”
Version 0.16.1 will be released on 2025-12-07:
https://github.com/wader/fq
Three years ago, we also used this tool extensively in the Report from the Field #29.
HandBrake (GUI): Video transcoder.
Version 1.10.2 has been released on 2025-09-06:
https://handbrake.fr/
MediaInfo (GUI and CLI): The metadata extractor.
Version 25.10 has been released on 2025-11-05:
https://mediaarea.net/MediaInfo
MKVToolNix (GUI): Create, alter and inspect Matroska files.
Version 96.0 has been released on 2025-11-08:
https://mkvtoolnix.download/index.html
mpv (CLI and GUI): “A free, open source, and cross-platform media player.”
Version 0.40.0 has been released on 2025-03-25:
https://mpv.io
This is our preferred media player, which we use with the latest version 8.0.1 of FFmpeg.
Nano (CLI): Text editor. This is not a word processing software.
Version 8.7 has been released on 2025-11-12:
https://www.nano-editor.org/
OpenEXR: Reference implementation of the OpenEXR file format (and video codec).
Version 3.4.4 has been released on 2025-11-19:
https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openexr/releases/tag/v3.4.4
We no longer use OpenEXR as our working format, but we did for half a dozen years.
Shutter Encoder (GUI): Media transcoder.
Version 19.7 has been released on 2025-12-07:
https://github.com/paulpacifico/shutter-encoder/releases/tag/19.7
The Cable Bible: The cable bible by Ethan Gates.
Version 2025-11-20 is online:
https://github.com/amiaopensource/cable-bible
Since this release Reto has fixed the issue that occurred when the Cable Bible was used offline on macOS and AArch64, but the patch has not been merged yet. The same problem persists under Linux.
VLC (GUI): The media player.
Version 3.0.21 has been released on 2024-06-05:
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Season’s greetings from Joshua, Michal and Reto

2025-12-23