CC BY
© 1993–2026 by Reto Kromer

This website is released under
a CC BY 4.0 License.

#AVpres Newsletter 2026-04-20

Table of Contents

  1. Trainings
  2. Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon
  3. Call for Papers
  4. Software Used by Archives

1. Trainings

1.1. A Summer School and an Autumn School

We strongly believe that the digitisation of analogue film, video and sound collections needs to be speeded up! That is why we have decided to resume the format of the intensive one-week seminars we have organised a long time ago. We will dedicate one seminar to the design and construction of film scanners and another seminar to chemical treatments intended to mitigate the degradation of analog media and make a last digitisation possible:

1.2. Reports from the Field

We are currently working on the following four meetings:

  • Soviet 1-inch SECAM video variants, on 15 May 2026
    This is a follow-up to Mass digitisation of 1-inch Type C videotape requested by the IASA community.
  • Shutdown of our second render farm, on 5 June 2026
    We previously planned to hold this on 17 July, the 33rd anniversary of Slackware, the Linux flavour we use for the render farms, but there is a clash of dates with Yiddish Summer Weimar.
  • “Bash on [Ubuntu on] Windows,” on 2 August 2026
    We will take stock on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), a piece of software we frequently use on Windows computers.
  • Apple’s past and present hardware ProRes encoding, on 30 October 2026
    An attempt to respond to a request we received several times.

1.3. Public lecture

Reto will give a public lecture on the topic of “Was können wir überhaupt noch bewahren? Analoge und digitale Filmkonservierung und -restaurierung” (What can we possibly still preserve? Analogue and digital film conservation and restoration) at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, on 28 May 2026 at 18:00.

2. Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon

We already mentionned in the #AVpres Newsletter 2026-01-05 that 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 Apple’s own AArch64 (ARM64) processors and current operating system. We are seeing more and more computer failures during an official macOS update (!) on machines whose warranty had recently expired. Apple’s customer service chat and service providers have always the very same piece of advice: buy a new computer …

At last December’s “39C3” conference, Sven Peter gave an outstanding presentation on Porting Linux to Apple Silicon. It works on M1 and M2 machines, and is also possible on M3, but more work is needed for M4 and M5. The recording of Sven’s presentation, as well as more information about the Fedora Asahi Remix, are freely available. This way we managed to install Linux on our two broken Apple computers and five broken Apple computers belonging to customers, in order to give the machines a new life:

  • Mac mini (M1, 2020)
  • MacBook Air (M1, 2020)
  • Mac mini (M2, 2023) – two machines
  • Mac mini (M2 Pro, 2023)
  • Mac Studio (M2 Ultra, 2023)
  • Mac Pro (Rack, M2 Ultra, 2023)

3. Call for Papers

We highly recommend the following two conferences, which can be attended over two consecutive weeks this year:

No Time to Wait 10
14–16 October 2026 at Filmoteka Narodowa – Instytut Audiowizualny (FINA) in Warsaw, Poland
https://mediaarea.net/NoTimeToWait10
There is currently no deadline for submissions.
Disclaimer: AV Preservation by reto.ch is the main recurring sponsor of this annual open-source conference.
IASA–BAAC Joint Conference 2026
19–22 October 2026 at Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania in Vilnius
“Archives in Times of Peace and War: Safeguarding Audiovisual Memory, Identity, and Authenticity”
https://2025.iasa-web.org
The deadline for submissions has been extended to 27 April 2026.
Disclaimer: AV Preservation by reto.ch is a sponsor of IASA.

If you are eligible and able to travel to the United States during these difficult times, we also warmly recommend:

AMIA Annual Conference
2–4 December 2026 in Pittsburgh, PA, United States.
https://amiaconference.net/amia-2026-call-for-proposals
The deadline for submissions is 1st June 2026.
Disclaimer: Reto held various positions within AMIA for a quarter of a century.

4. Software Used by Archives

CLI = command-line interface
GUI = graphical user interface
web = web interface

Aaru Data Preservation Suite (CLI)
“All-in-one solution for digital media preservation and archival.”
Version 5.4.2 LTS has has been released on 2026-02-14:
https://github.com/aaru-dps/Aaru
The developer, Natalia Portillo, has released the Alpha 19 of a new version 6.0.0 on 2026-03-11.
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
Audacity (GUI)
Recording and editing sounds.
Version 3.7.7 has been released on 2025-11-25:
https://www.audacityteam.org/
Bash (CLI)
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)
“Get any content cinema-ready.”
Version 2.18.38 has been released on 2026-04-12:
https://dcpomatic.com/
FFmpeg (CLI)
The FFmpeg package consists of the three commands ffmpeg (a media transcoder), ffprobe (a media metadata extractor) and ffplay (a media player), as well as seven librairies including libavformat (a container collection), libavcodec (a codec collection) and libavfilter (a filter collection).
Version 8.1 has been released on 2026-03-16:
https://ffmpeg.org/
fq (CLI)
“Tool, language and decoders for working with binary data.”
Version 0.17.0 has been released on 2026-03-15:
https://github.com/wader/fq
HandBrake (GUI)
A video transcoder.
Version 1.11.1 has been released on 2026-03-22:
https://handbrake.fr/
MediaConch (GUI, CLI and web)
“Implementation checker, policy checker, reporter, and fixer that targets preservation-level audiovisual files.”
Version 25.04 has been released on 2025-05-05:
https://mediaarea.net/MediaConch
https://mediaarea.net/MediaConchOnline/
MediaInfo (GUI, CLI and web)
The most popular metadata extractor.
Version 26.01 has been released on 2026-02-02:
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 9.0 has been released on 2026-04-08:
https://www.nano-editor.org/
This is our preferred text editor.
OpenEXR
The reference implementation of the OpenEXR file format (and video codec).
Version 3.4.10 has been released on 2026-04-17:
https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openexr
QCTools (GUI)
Analyse and understand digitised video files through use of audiovisual analytics and filtering.
Version 1.4.1 has been released possibly on 2025-05-19:
https://mediaarea.net/QCTools
https://github.com/bavc/qctools
We don’t know when exactly the last version has been released, but we know that since 2026-01-13 it’s finally available for all operating systems.
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
Disclaimer: We have supported this project since its inception, and Reto co-owns the copyright.
Shutter Encoder (GUI)
A media transcoder.
Version 20.0 has been released on 2026-04-08:
https://github.com/paulpacifico/shutter-encoder
The Cable Bible
A valuable resource by Ethan Gates.
Version 2025-11-20 is online:
https://github.com/amiaopensource/cable-bible
VLC (GUI)
A very popular media player.
Version 3.0.23 has been released on 2026-01-08:
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
vrecord (CLI/GUI)
Open-source software for capturing a video signal and turning it into a digital file.
Version 2026-03-03 has been released:
https://github.com/amiaopensource/vrecord
yt-dlp (CLI)
A feature-rich command-line media downloader.
Version 2026.03.17 has been released:
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

 

Best regards from Joshua, Michal and Reto

2026-04-20