#AVpres Newsletter 2026-09-11

The closing of AV Preservation by reto.ch
Training
Swiss Film and Video Directory
Software used by archives

1. The closing of AV Preservation by reto.ch

Our company will permanently close its doors in December 2026, six months earlier than originally planned. The official announcement of the liquidation will be published in the commercial register of the canton Bern in the coming days. We are accepting new projects only until mid-November and look forward to completing them with our usual care before the end of the year.

The order situation in Switzerland is no longer self-sustaining and we do not want to bring any further work to Switzerland, where we would have to bear significantly higher costs than abroad. Since our founding in 2004, we have never received any financial help or subsidies. On the contrary, we have provided financial support to numerous associations, projects, conferences, publications and also individuals. The main ones can be found at the end of the annual summaries of our Training Courses, under the “Patronage of the Arts and the Sciences” section.

Joshua will take up a leading position at a foreign museum of modern art starting in October, rather than in January as previously planned. Michal will continue her research in image technology; at the time of publishing this newsletter, whether she does so here in Switzerland or abroad remains uncertain. Post-retirement, Reto plans to continue working part-time as an independent consultant and trainer in audiovisual preservation.

Thank you for your support over 23 years!

2. Training

2.1. Chemical Treatments and Alchemy of Last Resort

Regrettably, we did not reach the minimum number of eight registrations required for our Autumn School to be self-sustaining. We have already reached out to the seven people who signed up to inform them of the cancellation. Having begun our week-long seminars with chemical treatments for conservation and restoration, we would have very much liked to revisit this topic twenty years later and thus come full circle …

2.2. FFmpeg

Following the upcoming closure of the company, the planned advanced FFmpeg course has been rescheduled for next year. We look forward to providing you with the new dates and setup as soon as they are finalised. Stay tuned for updates!

2.3. Presentations

Reto will be giving a lightning talk entitled “No More Time to Waste” at the No Time to Wait conference at Filmoteka Narodowa – Instytut Audiowizualny (FINA) in Warsaw, Poland, from 14 to 16 October 2026.
Although he will be there, Reto will not be giving a presentation on the topic of “On the Environmental Impact of Audiovisual Files” at the IASA–BAAC Joint Conference 2026 at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania in Vilnius from 19 to 22 October 2026. This is the presentation he had originally prepared for the Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) in Canberra, which he was unable to attend for personal reasons.

2.4. A look into the future

We plan to announce the courses we will organise for the first half of 2027 in cooperation with Lichtspiel and/or Memoriav in the next newsletter or the one after that.

3. Swiss Film and Video Directory

Although we had planned to discontinue this activity in June 2023, another small update of our Swiss Film and Video Directory took place. We have added some recently released films and videos, including porn.

4. Software used by archives

Updates since the last newsletter are highlighted in bold.

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 Beta 1 of a new version 6.0.0 on 2026-07-15.
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 4.0.0 has been released on 2026-09-03:
https://www.audacityteam.org/
Bash (CLI): Command language interpreter that executes commands read from the standard input, a string or a script file.
Version 5.3.15 has been released on 2026-06-09:
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/
This is the shell we use daily.
DCP-o-matic (GUI): “Get any content cinema-ready.”
Version 2.18.50 has been released on 2026-09-08:
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 9.0.1 has been released on 2026-08-12:
https://ffmpeg.org/
We use our own FFmpeg distribution.
fq (CLI): “Tool, language and decoders for working with binary data.”
Version 0.18.0 has been released on 2026-08-25:
https://github.com/wader/fq
HandBrake (GUI): A video transcoder.
Version 1.11.2 has been released on 2026-06-07:
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 101.0 has been released on 2026-08-24:
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 9.2 has been released on 2026-07-31:
https://www.nano-editor.org/
This is our preferred text editor.
OpenEXR: The reference implementation of the OpenEXR file format (and video codec).
Version 3.4.15 has been released on 2026-08-22:
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 the development of the original idea, and Reto co-owns the copyright.
Shutter Encoder (GUI): A media transcoder.
Version 20.3 has been released on 2026-08-31:
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 2026-08-27 was released:
https://github.com/amiaopensource/vrecord
yt-dlp (CLI): A feature-rich command-line media downloader.
Version 2026.08.19 was released:
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Best regards from Joshua, Michal and Reto

2026-09-09