Ever wondered what happens when 100-year old celluloid cinema film meets digital workflows? Come and hear about the BFI National Archive, where FFmpeg is more than just a tool—it’s a vital force in safeguarding Britain’s audiovisual heritage. Witness how we seamlessly compress multi-terabyte film frame image scans into preservation video formats, and discover how open source libraries power our National Television Archive’s live off-air recording system, capturing an impressive 1TB of British ‘telly’ per day. We’ll look at how vintage hardware digitises broadcast videotape collections, feeding them into automated slicing and transcoding pipelines, with FFmpeg at the heart of our open-source toolkit. This essential technology keeps cultural heritage alive and accessible across the UK through platforms like the BFI Player, UK libraries, and the BFI’s Mediatheque. Archives internationally have a growing network of developers working on solutions to challenges like format obsolescence by developing and encoding to open standards like FFV1 and Matroska! With high volumes of digitised and born-digital content flowing into global archives daily, the BFI National Archive embrace the spirit of open-source by sharing our codebase, enabling other archives to learn from our practices. As the Developer who builds many of these workflows, I’m eager to share the code that drives our transcoding processes. I’m passionate about showcasing our work at conferences and celebrating the contributions of open-source developers, like attendees at Demuxed. This talk was presented at Demuxed 2025 in London, a conference by and for engineers working in video. Every year we host a conference with lots of great new talks like this – learn more at https://demuxed.com