This is an industrial problem in the film world. Celluloid film keeps remarkably well in moderately good conditions (cool and dry), and more importantly it's so standardized that you can load a decades-old film into a new projector and it will just play back correctly. The Academy standard for 35mm film has been in place since 1932 for example, and specifies everything down to the shape of the little holes on the side: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_perforations
Digital video archival is a nightmare. Although the physical storage media problems are now going away thanks to cloud services and suchlike, there isn't yet an established standard for picture storage - the main contenders are MXF and Adobe's Cinema DNG.
Because it works, and transcoding would lose even more quality?
Digital video archival is a nightmare. Although the physical storage media problems are now going away thanks to cloud services and suchlike, there isn't yet an established standard for picture storage
Sure. Are they still going to be the relevant useful standards 40-50 years from now? Will software/hardware for working with them still be readily available? Will the storage media be in as good condition as film would be?
Most "classic" movies are at least that old, and many are decades older than that. Archiving and preserving them requires something other than the flavor-of-the-decade codec.
Sure. Are they still going to be the relevant useful standards 40-50 years from now? Will software/hardware for working with them still be readily available?
Well, my computer can still decode wav files, and that format is close to 25 years old now. What does it matter if the standards now aren't "useful" standards in the future? Why would projects such as VLC (which plays pretty much every format that has ever been created), etc. go away?
Are they still going to be the relevant useful standards 40-50 years from now? Will software/hardware for working with them still be readily available?
In 40-50 years from now we might not be creating new content in those formats, but the fact that they're official standards and there's plenty of source code around for decoding/encoding them means that they'll remain usable as long as general purpose computers continue to exist. (This is an actual real concern now, given the proliferation of DRM'd formats and proprietary restricted systems.)
Will the storage media be in as good condition as film would be?
Longevity of storage media is a slightly different and independent issue from file format, and one that could be applied to many other things; but as long as the original bits survive in some form or other, either through storage on long-term media or repeated copying, it won't vanish.
Did you seriously call MPEG "flavor-of-the-decade"?
Are you aware that probably 1 billion TV's can decode it? If there is ever a codec that can be called a "forever codec" it's MPEG. (MPEG-2 to be specific.)
H.264 support is not far behind.
It's only getting easier, not harder, to support every video format ever made.
What codec should they have used back in 2003?