Category Archives: Technical

Site down some of Tuesday and Wednesday for Power Upgrade

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Ralf Muehlen

[Update:   Upgrade is done, we were offline twice, as we predicted (and are sorry about), but now we have twice the power. Thank you PG&E, Ralf Muehlen, and the Archive engineers.] This week, we are doubling the power coming into … Continue reading →

Posted in News, Technical | 3 Comments

Celebrating 100 million tasks (uploading and modifying archive.org content)

Posted on April 12, 2013 by traceypooh

Just over 8-1/2 years ago, I wrote a multi-process daemon in PHP that we refer to as “catalogd”.  It runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no rest! It is in charge of uploading all content to our … Continue reading →

Posted in News, Technical | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

new mp4 (h.264) derivative technique — simpler and easy!

Posted on February 9, 2013 by traceypooh

Greetings video geeks!  8-) We’ve updated the process and way we create our .mp4 files that are shown on video pages on archive.org It’s a much cleaner/clearer process, namely: We opted to ditch ffpreset files in favor of command-line argument … Continue reading →

Posted in Movie Archive, Technical, Television Archive, tv archive, Video Archive | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

new video and audio player — video multiple qualities, related videos, and more!

Posted on February 9, 2013 by traceypooh

Many of you have already noticed that since the New Year, we have migrated our new “beta” player to be the primary/default player, then to be the only player. We are excited about this new player! It features the very … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio Archive, Live Music Archive, Movie Archive, Technical, Television Archive, tv archive, Video Archive | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

files.xml and metadata API now showing video file’s width, height, and duration

Posted on February 9, 2013 by traceypooh

For those video oriented of you who inspect our _files.xml directly, or use a metadata API (JSON) for items, you’ll likely be pleased to know that for all new items, as well as items that update (eg: review posted, metadata … Continue reading →

Posted in Movie Archive, News, Technical, Television Archive, tv archive, Video Archive | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

getting only certain formats in .zip files from items — new feature

Posted on October 30, 2012 by traceypooh

Per some requests from our friends in the Live Music Archive community… You can get any archive.org item downloaded to your local machine as a .zip file (that we’ve been doing for 5+ years!) But whereas before it would be … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio Archive, Live Music Archive, Technical | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Uploading images for text items (update on *_images.zip format)

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Hank Bromley

The old news Until about a year ago, if you wanted to upload a set of individual page images and have them be recognized as a “book” so we’d create the usual derivative formats from them, you had to mimic … Continue reading →

Posted in Books Archive, Technical | 1 Comment

Improved theora/ogg video derivatives!

Posted on May 1, 2012 by traceypooh

We’ve made our ogg video derivatives slightly better via: minor bump up to “thusnelda” release “upgrade” from 1-pass video encoding to 2-pass video encoding direct ffmpeg creation of the video (you’ll need to re/compile ffmpeg minimally with “–enable-libtheora –enable-libvorbis” configure … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical, Video Archive | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Downloading in bulk using wget

Posted on April 26, 2012 by internetarchive

If you’ve ever wanted to download files from many different archive.org items in an automated way, here is one method to do it. ____________________________________________________________ Here’s an overview of what we’ll do: 1. Confirm or install a terminal emulator and wget … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical | 19 Comments

IA forums now do “inline reply”

Posted on February 11, 2012 by traceypooh

One thing that’s driven me a bit kooky is every time I “reply to this post” in the Internet Archive forums, it drives the browser to a new form page with no context/content of the post I was just looking … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical | Tagged | 1 Comment

new off-site video/audio embed codes

Posted on January 14, 2012 by traceypooh

We are about to rollout a “new new” video/audio player You can see it in action now with our upcoming embed codes to go with this new player. It will allow for additional much wanted features like: – off-site playlists … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical, Video Archive | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

improved h.264 derivatives!

Posted on June 4, 2011 by traceypooh

We have thoroughly tested a newer and simpler way to create h.264 derivatives! Changes you’ll notice: More pixels!  previously 320 x 240    goes to 640 x 480 pixels Slightly higher video bitrate — from about 512kb/s   to   … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical, Video Archive | Tagged , , , , , | 25 Comments

How Archive.org items are structured

Posted on March 31, 2011 by internetarchive

What is an item? An item is a logical “thing” that we present on one web page on archive.org. An item may be one video file along with scans of the DVD cover, one book, one audio file, or a … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical | 5 Comments

How Montana State Library Uploaded Batches of Digital Objects to the Internet Archive

Posted on December 30, 2010 by internetarchive

by Chris Stockwell for Montana State Library, 12/29/2010 Introduction The Montana State Library (MSL) last year moved a copy of its collection of 3000 born digital state publications to the Internet Archive (IA). Since MSL will be continuing to upload … Continue reading →

Posted in Books Archive, Technical | 10 Comments

New BookReader!

Posted on December 10, 2010 by internetarchive

By mang We’re pleased to announce the release of our freshly re-designed BookReader on the Internet Archive. The updated BookReader has these great new features (links will take you to a live example): Redesigned user interface that maximizes the amount … Continue reading →

Posted in Books Archive, Open Library, Technical | 23 Comments

The Fourth Generation Petabox

Posted on July 27, 2010 by internetarchive

Behind all the cool stuff users see on archive.org is some serious hardware. I was curious about the ongoing development of data storage here at Internet Archive. I spent a little time with Mario, Master of the Machines, while he … Continue reading →

Posted in Hardware, News, Technical | 13 Comments

New Support for HTML5 audio tag!

Posted on July 9, 2010 by internetarchive

We just rolled out the [audio] tag support option for our audio files (which is similar to our [video] tag support that we have had as an option for a bit). So patrons can now opt to not use our … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio Archive, Technical | Tagged , | 7 Comments

better mp4 (h.264) derivatives at archive.org!

Posted on April 26, 2010 by internetarchive

Late last week, we pushed live a new video deriving technique, as well as in the process updated our audio/video file reader, ffmpeg. New items will benefit from this newer method, and prior items can be re-derived by users if … Continue reading →

Posted in Technical, Video Archive | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Project funded to add features to a Million books

Posted on September 28, 2009 by internetarchive

The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at UMass Amherst, the Perseus Digital Library Project at Tufts, and the Internet Archive are investigating large-scale information extraction and retrieval technologies for digitized book collections. The NSF has awarded a grant of $2.7 … Continue reading →

Posted in Announcements, News, Technical | Leave a comment

Book Reader supports Zooming

Posted on September 9, 2009 by internetarchive

Internet Archive’s web-based book reader now supports zooming and panning around books with their pages open. This is helpful for foldout maps. The books can be embedded into any webpage, and the software is all opensource so others can integrate … Continue reading →

Posted in Announcements, Technical | Leave a comment