Flow draft for INA FRAME 2021

# File Formats


* Why bother?
  Just get one that has:

  * Best quality 
  * Preserve original properties 
  * Lowest size 
  * Fast and easy to open/use 
  * Lasts forever 
  * + cherries 🍒 & ice cream 🍦on top!

* Risks to format longevity
  * Data errors
  * Obsolescence
  * Interoperability issues
  * Vendor lock-in

  Countermeasures?



* Digital Video Trinity
  * Container
  * Codec
    It's all about filesize to be honest.
  * Metadata
  * Other tracks (subtitle, timecode, etc)

That's what makes AV a bit more special than e.g. image or audio-only file formats, because it basically contains a little bit of everything, therefore requiring more to be considered. In combination with each other.

TODO: Make better drawing?
    Align with Brecht's "media file anatomy" visualization?


* Mediainfo screenshot
  Just to give a quick look at "hey, there really are several different things in one file"


* AV Characteristics:
  * video
    * resolution
    * fps
    * interlaced/progressive

  * audio
    * samplerate
    * bit depth
    * channels


* Different use cases, different formats

* Bitrate = data per time

* Significant properties

* Size compression
  * lossy, lossless, uncompressed?


* Best practices for AV


* Why more than 1 format?
  * interoperability:
    * feature overload issues (wenger)
    * vs minimalistic standards
  * speed: encoding/decoding complexity
  * filesize implications
    * storage (and retrieval/access)
    * data I/O

* Sustainability
  * open vs closed
  * just documented vs open reference implementation
    (image: lego vs playmobil)
  * eternal replayer
  * error resilience


* Popular format combinations


* Making a choice
  * Circle drawing (find the sweet spot)


# NEW!

* Decision graph for selecting a file format?
* Decision scenarios to play through?

* Links:
[A Digital Media Primer for Geeks (xiph.org)](https://www.xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml)
[Understanding audio bitrate (adobe.com)](https://www.adobe.com/sea/creativecloud/video/discover/audio-bitrate.html)



