#AVpres Newsletter 2026-05-18

One more year
Trainings
Bash Scripts for Audiovisual Preservation
FFmpeg 8.1.1 has been released
Swiss Film and Video Directory
Call for Papers
Software Used by Archives

1. One more year

Our first company reto.ch was active during the 9 years from 2004 to 2012.

Our second company AV Preservation by reto.ch is active since 2013 and will close end of June 2027. We will therefore be available here in Switzerland for about another year, and during this period we would be delighted to implement projects in our areas of expertise. Let’s plan our last projects together now! In fact, once we have dismantled all our infrastructure, it will be too late …

Joshua, who has worked with us since 2013, will take up a leading position at a foreign museum of modern art early next year. Michal, who joined our team in 2017, will continue her research in image technology, whether here in Switzerland or abroad is still uncertain. Reto, who founded the companies, is expected to continue working a little as an independent consultant and trainer in the field of audiovisual preservation even after his retirement and the closure of the company.

2. Trainings

2.1. 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. Registration is now open:

Moving Beyond Inertia: Manufacturing of Archive Film Scanners from 3 to 7 August 2026
Beyond Reason: Chemical Treatments and Alchemy of Last Resort from 16 to 20 November 2026

2.2. 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. If you are in Vienna, please come along and let’s have a drink after the lecture.

2.3. Reports from the Field

We are currently working on the following three meetings:

From a CPU-based render farm to a GPU-based render farm, on 5 June 2026
We will discuss the reasons and methods for designing and building our first CPU-based render farm, the experience we gained from it, the reasons for converting it into a second GPU-based render farm, and again, the experience we gained from that.
“Bash on [Ubuntu on] Windows,” on 2 August 2026
We will take stock on the occasion of the 10^th 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.

3. Bash Scripts for Audiovisual Preservation

Bash_AVpres is a set of Bash scripts for audiovisual 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.

Today we release a minor version of the package. The main changes are:

Bash version 4.3 or later is now required for the metadata_csv and name_hash scripts
we tested the other scripts with Bash 3.2 – which was released twenty years ago!
we modified the make_framemd5 and verify_framemd5 scripts
we updated the man pages
and last but not least, Michal is now officially a co-author together with Reto, to ensure maintenance and further development even after his retirement.

We currently test our software – including the Bash_AVpres package – on various modern x86-64 (AMD64) and AArch64 (ARM64) architectures, running on the following operating systems:

Linux: Debian 13.4, 12.13 and 11.11
Linux: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, 24.04.4 LTS and 22.04.5 LTS
Macintosh: macOS 26.5, 15.7.5 and 14.8.5
Windows 11: version 26H1, 25H2, 24H2 and 23H2 running Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2.7.3)

And we know it also works on various other operating systems.

No Time to Wait 10: 14–16 October 2026 at Filmoteka Narodowa – Instytut Audiowizualny (FINA) in Warsaw, Poland
https://mediaarea.net/NoTimeToWait10
There is no deadline for submissions.
Disclaimer: AV Preservation by reto.ch is the main recurring sponsor of this annual open-source conference.
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 1^st June 2026.
Disclaimer: Reto held various positions within AMIA for a quarter of a century.

7. Software Used by Archives

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

Updates since the last newsletter are highlighted in bold, as requested by our readers.

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 2.18.40 has been released on 2026-05-11:
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 8.1.1 has been released on 2026-05-04:
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 26.05 has been released on 2026-05-12:
https://mediaarea.net/MediaInfo
MKVToolNix (GUI): Create, alter and inspect Matroska files.
Version 98.0 has been released on 2026-04-05:
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 3.4.11 has been released on 2026-04-30:
https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openexr
QCTools (GUI): Analyse and understand digitised video files through use of audiovisual analytics and filtering.
Version 1.4 or 1.4.1 has been released possibly on 2025-05-19:
https://mediaarea.net/QCTools
https://github.com/bavc/qctools
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 20.1 has been released on 2026-05-04:
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 2025-12-19:
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

2026-05-17

#AVpres Newsletter 2026-05-18

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