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Digitizing some old family movies. On the lockdown front, it's been nice seen pictures of family. Technically, I've had a number of side quests along the way that were more challenging than actually digitizing the old tapes.

If you're thinking about doing the same, for formats and media, I settled on:

DVDs: yes, they're old, but they support more resolution than VHS, and practically every new Bluray player still plays them. Also, DVDs support 352x480 resolution. It's still more than VHS, and you can squeeze more content on the disc or encode it at a higher quality.

VP9+Opus+webm on a DVD. This codec/container combo is supported by Firefox, Chrome, Windows Media Player, and Android, so while new, I expected it to be supported for a long time. AV1 looks promising, but probably not ready.

I'm not bothering, but for iOS, use x264 and AAC in an mp4 container. Those were the only modern codecs and containers I got to work. Also, Apple, x264 and x265 are good, and all, but there's no excuse to not support VP9.

I'm saving the unencoded files as ffv1/flac in an mkv container.

For the actual DVDs, I'm using MDisc archival media.



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