I meant in the ideal sense, not practical—every bit of tape essentially corresponds to a timestamp because the medium is essentially one-dimensional. Of course

I meant in the ideal sense, not practical—every bit of tape essentially corresponds to a timestamp because the medium is essentially one-dimensional. Of course the physical reality of tape is much more complex, but when considering something like an archival data format you need to take into account which aspects of physical reality to preserve and which aspects to drop. The advantage of the QuickTime container format is that it allows for a straightforward representation of all of the aspects of tape that matter for archival purposes—including subtleties like inter-block gaps, tape mark sequences, leader lengths, bad blocks, and so on—in addition to allowing straightforward and efficient storage of data blocks of varying sizes and open-ended metadata, as well as allowing for the possibility of non-destructive editing. Most attempts to represent tape for archival to this point simply haven’t handled any of this, and have instead have just treated tapes as fixed sequences of files containing blocks, often without even recording the sizes of those blocks.