Legacy Format

What makes a better archivable format? Its intents should be strictly defined, and optimally reproducible.

For images, pixels are well defined, but videos are often lossy compressed. Vector graphics require calculations that are often not portable between environments, in terms of behaviors and performance.

In computer music, tracks from the pre-CD age could require special hardware to playback, which adds to the difficulty for reproducing the original intended sounds. Also hardware synthesizers are not deterministic in the output signal, just like any other analogue source.