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A comment on The long road to recover Frogger 2 source from tape drives. Parent comment

Re:The long road to recover Frogger 2 source from tape drives by moron4hire on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @03:56PM (#36063153)
While it's true that these standards are X years old, the software that encoded those formats yesteryear is very different from the software that decodes it today. It's a Ship of Theseus problem. They can claim an unbroken lineage since the distant future, the year 2000, but encoders and decoders had defects and opinions that were relied on--both intentionally and unintentionally--that are different from the defects and opinions of today.

I have JPEGs and MP3s from 20 years ago that don't open today.

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Re:The long road to recover Frogger 2 source from tape drives by matja on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @05:39PM (#36064210)
Are they really JPEGs and MP3s, or just bitrot?

I've found https://github.com/ImpulseAdventure/JPEGsnoop useful to fix corruption but I haven't come across a non-standard JFIF JPEG unless it was intentionally designed to accommodate non-standard features (alpha channel etc).

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Re:The long road to recover Frogger 2 source from tape drives by orbital-decay on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @06:06PM (#36064455)
I personally never encountered JPEGs or MP3s which were totally unreadable due to the being encoded by ancient software versions, but the metadata in common media formats is a total mess. Cameras and encoders are writing all sorts of obscure proprietary tags, or even things like X-Ray (STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl game engine) keeping gameplay-relevant binary metadata in OGG Vorbis comments. Which is even technically compliant with the standard I think, but that won't help you much.
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Re:The long road to recover Frogger 2 source from tape drives by LocalH on Thursday May 25, 2023 @09:01AM (#36070176)
> X-Ray (STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl game engine) keeping gameplay-relevant binary metadata in OGG Vorbis comments

Just, ew

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Re:The long road to recover Frogger 2 source from tape drives by jlawson on Wednesday May 24, 2023 @07:56PM (#36065488)
In the case of individual files with non-conformant or corrupted elements it seems fairly straightforward project to build an AI model that can fix up broken files with a single click. I suspect such a thing will be widely-accessible in 10 years.
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