Cuebus: what components travel with your video.

A video file carries a lot more than the picture: caption timings, color information telling a display what it's looking at, chapter marks, camera metadata, and increasingly a record of who compiled the raw footage and how.

Most of that is somewhat fragile. It might survive one transcode and not the next, and usually nobody notices until something looks wrong on somebody else's screen with no way to trace where it went missing. The headaches of all headaches for engineers.

• Do caption timings survive a normal encode and package chain, and by how much do they drift when they don't? Auto-generated captions are everywhere now, and almost nobody checks their timing.
• Color metadata disappears quietly, all the time. How often, at which step, and what does it actually look like when it happens? This is usually the real answer to "why does my HDR look wrong over there."
• Cameras are starting to run inference right on the sensor and attach the results to the footage. Does that data survive a normal pipeline attached to the right frame, and can it get signed at the moment of capture?
• Content credentials are showing up more. What does attaching one actually take, and does it survive getting handled downstream?

Preservation belongs here because it's the same problem stretched over a much longer clock. Tapes are aging out right now, and a lot of them are getting captured in spare rooms by people with a deck and a capture card, doing careful work with no shared way to describe how the capture was even done. Analog is cool, and we can ensure its legacy endures.

Big archives have standards for this. The person doing it for a smaller team usually doesn't, which means two careful captures of the same tape can produce files nobody can actually compare. A shared way to record the deck, the signal path, and exactly what came out and what didn't would help, and there's no reason it has to wait until anyone owns fancier equipment. Let's save some money and avoid eBay if we can.

Timing and transport are Genlock's problem. Coding and delivery belong to MuxNode.