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© 1993–2026 by Reto Kromer

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#AVpres Newsletter 2026-01-05

Table of Contents

  1. This Newsletter
  2. FFmpeg Training
  3. The “Reports from the Field” Series
  4. Bash Scripts for Audio-Visual Preservation
  5. Apple
  6. Software Used by Archives

1. This Newsletter

Many thanks to all new subscribers for your interest: 59 between the 1st and the 2nd newsletter, and even 137 between the 2nd and this 3rd newsletter: there seems to be a real need!

Due to popular demand, we are now also publishing the newsletters on our website:
https://avpres.net/newsletter/

2. FFmpeg Training

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

 

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

 

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.

3. The “Reports from the Field” Series

We were asked many times to make public all the handouts and resources from the Reports from the Field series.

On one hand, we will not do it now, because we don’t wish to be spoiled by AI robots that are destroying the planet Earth in many respects.

On the other hand, please understand that our company needs to earn money, in order to pay the salaries, as well as all the expenses. Each of us gets exactly the same gross salary of CHF 5750 per months and we have not been able to increase this amount since 2011. The amount may seem high, but living costs in Switzerland are very high and it is actually 82 % of the median Swiss salary (fifteen years ago this was 96 %). We believe that we already offer the community a great deal with our free meetings and simply cannot afford to do more. We have never received any subsidies.

 

We are currently working on upcoming meetings, particularly on the following topics:

  • 10th anniversary of “Bash on [Ubuntu on] Windows”
  • Soviet 1-inch SECAM video variants
  • Apple’s past and present hardware ProRes encoding
  • decommissioning of our 2nd render farm

Your comments and suggestions are also welcome, as always!

4. Bash Scripts for Audio-Visual Preservation

Bash_AVpres is a set of Bash scripts for audio-visual preservation, used on a daily base at our conservation and restoration lab. These small programs are designed for both to be used individually and to be chained each other as needed. We made the first public release during the popular online training Bash for Archivists, that Joshua Ng and Reto organised during the pandenic.

During the last year we made some micro-releases in order to fix two edge-effect bugs that have been reported by users. We also have updated the information of the manual pages (“man” pages) when it was obsolete, removed some old operating system versions from our testing suite and removed the script “ffengine_presets” from the set, because the associated resource FFCommand_Engine is not longer maintained upstream.

We currently test our software, including the “Bash_AVpres” scripts, on various modern x86-64 and AArch64 architectures, running on the following operating systems:

  • Linux: Debian 13.2, 12.12 and 11.11; Ubuntu 25.10, 24.04.3 LTS and 22.04.5 LTS
  • Macintosh: macOS 26.2, 15.7.3 and 14.8.2
  • Windows 11 version 25H2, 24H2 and 23H2 running Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

 

We are working on a new major release. We plan to include scripts which allow to update a checksum manifest and BagIt archive when only a few files are added or removed. And we plan to include also scripts which allow to repair a broken checksum manifest and BagIt archive. Stay tuned!

5. Apple

We strongly discourage the use of macOS for professional purposes! The best choice today is undoubtedly Linux distributions, and the second best is Windows.

We made very bad experiences with the new processors and current operating systems. Two out of three remaining Apple computers were broken after an upgrade from macOS 15.7.1 to 15.7.2 on a four-year old MacBook Air with M1, respectively from macOS 26.1 to 26.2 on a two-year old Mac Studio with M2 Ultra. Apple Service Chat and Apple Service Provider contradicts each other, and both provide factually incorrect explanations regarding the Memory Protection Engine and its error messages.

Given that several of our customers have also had similar negative experiences, we assume this is a case of planned obsolescence on the part of Apple.

 

At the recent “39C3” conference, Sven Peter gave an outstanding presentation on Porting Linux to Apple Silicon. This works on M1 and M2 machines and is also possible on M3, but more work is needed for M4 and M5. We will try to do the same thing with our broken Apple computers.

Here is the recording of Sven’s presentation:
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-apple-silicon

6. Software Used by Archives

CLI = command-line interface
GUI = graphical user interface

Aaru Data Preservation Suite (CLI)
“All-in-one solution for digital media preservation and archival.”
Version 5.4.1 LTS has has been released on 2025-08-14:
https://github.com/aaru-dps/Aaru
The developer, Natalia Portillo, has released the Alpha 17 of a new version 6.0.0 on 2025-12-26.
AEO-Light (GUI)
Extraction of optical sound tracks form image digitisations with sufficient overscanning.
Version 2.4 has has been released on 2025-07-23:
https://github.com/usc-imi/aeo-light
This is a good piece of open-source software which comes with a bad documentation. To our knowlegde exist:
  • the slides from a 10-year-old presentation of version 2.2 Beta
  • two videos on YouTube of version 2.3
  • three videos of version 2.3.1 on a blog by the Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC) at the University of South Carolina who developped the tool
  • instructions for building the tool under CentOS and Debian, contributed by Lorenz Schori
but still no manual that documents all the software’s options and parameters.
Audacity (GUI)
Recording and editing sounds.
Version 3.7.7 has been released on 2025-11-25:
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/
This is the shell we use daily.
DCP-o-matic (GUI)
“Digital cinema democratized.”
“Get any content cinema-ready.”
Version 2.18.34 has been released on 2025-12-16:
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 0.16.0 has been 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)
A 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 97.0 has been released on 2026-01-02:
https://mkvtoolnix.download/
mpv (CLI and GUI)
“A free, open source, and cross-platform media player.”
Version 0.41.0 has been released on 2025-12-21:
https://mpv.io
This is our preferred media player, which we use with our own FFmpeg distribution.
Nano (CLI)
A small and friendly text editor. This is not a word processing software.
Version 8.7 has been released on 2025-11-12:
https://www.nano-editor.org/
This is our preferred text editor.
OpenEXR
The 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
We no longer use OpenEXR as our working format, but we did for half a dozen years. Today we use our own MovIm video codec for high-end projects.
QCTools (GUI)
Analyse and understand digitised video files through use of audiovisual analytics and filtering.
Version 1.4 has been released on 2024-12-30:
https://mediaarea.net/QCTools
https://github.com/bavc/qctools
This is a piece of open-source software that comes with a good documentation.
RAWcooked (CLI)
“Encode and decode audio-visual RAW data with Matroska, FFV1 and FLAC.”
A bridge between uncompressed still images and lossless compressed video stream formats.
Version 25.12 has been released on 2025-12-30:
https://mediaarea.net/RAWcooked
Shutter Encoder (GUI)
A media transcoder.
Version 19.7 has been released on 2025-12-07:
https://github.com/paulpacifico/shutter-encoder
The Cable Bible
The cable bible by Ethan Gates.
Version 2025-11-20 is online:
https://github.com/amiaopensource/cable-bible
VLC (GUI)
The media player.
Version 3.0.21 has been released on 2024-06-05:
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
yt-dlp (CLI)
A feature-rich command-line media downloader.
Version 2025.12.08 has been released on … 2025-12-08:
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

 

Joshua, Michal and Reto wish you: date +'Happy %Y!'

2026-01-01