Last month the IASA Journal published an article I wrote on error detection and fixity issues. While IASA agreed to publish the article under an open license, in this case CC-BY-ND, the journal does not (yet) have an open access policy.

The article discusses two different approaches used in the application of checksums for audiovisual data: embedded checksums data used to audit transmission (MPEG CRCs, FLAC Fingerprints, and DV parity data) and external whole file checksums (more typical to digital preservation environments). In the article I outline how the effectiveness of a whole file checksum does not scale well for audiovisual data and make proposals on how formats such as ffmpeg’s framemd5 can enable more granular and efficient checksums for audiovisual data.

terminal output of ffmpeg evaluating framemd5 for an input file

The article may be found in IASA Journal Number 39 (login required) or re-posted on this blog here.