Blog Alert: Digital Curation Blog
Aug. 4th, 2008 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_clangerDoes your work (or hobby) involve archiving data, or looking at information that other people have archived? If so, you may be interested in the Digital Curation Blog, run by some people I know at Edinburgh University. Their latest post has some interesting snippets from a workshop on digital archiving, including this thought-provoking comment on storage formats:
...a half percent error rate in a BMP file shows a smattering of black pixels, whereas in a GIF file there were serious artefacts and visible damage introduced. Same error rate on a WAV file produces a barely audible rustle effect, while on a MP3 files sound is seriously distorted/. Same error rate on a DOC or PDF file, and you get “File damaged, cannot open”. Be very afraid!
Having done error-correction theory in my MSc (which included some painfully weird binary mathematics, some of which I understood for just long enough to pass the exam) it occurs to me that the overhead of adding error-correction coding to highly-compressed storage formats would be far less than the storage space saved my moving to them. An MP3 file is around a ten times smaller than the WAV file it is created from, so even going from 8 bits to 8+3 bits would still give a compression of seven times, with much improved resistance to bit errors. Anyone know anything about the use of ECC in highly-compressed lossy file formats?
...a half percent error rate in a BMP file shows a smattering of black pixels, whereas in a GIF file there were serious artefacts and visible damage introduced. Same error rate on a WAV file produces a barely audible rustle effect, while on a MP3 files sound is seriously distorted/. Same error rate on a DOC or PDF file, and you get “File damaged, cannot open”. Be very afraid!
Having done error-correction theory in my MSc (which included some painfully weird binary mathematics, some of which I understood for just long enough to pass the exam) it occurs to me that the overhead of adding error-correction coding to highly-compressed storage formats would be far less than the storage space saved my moving to them. An MP3 file is around a ten times smaller than the WAV file it is created from, so even going from 8 bits to 8+3 bits would still give a compression of seven times, with much improved resistance to bit errors. Anyone know anything about the use of ECC in highly-compressed lossy file formats?
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Date: 2008-08-05 11:31 am (UTC)