> Would future civilizations go through the trouble of understanding our video codecs? Machine language?
I would say yes; we go to great lengths to extract information from hard-to-read ancient sources, so future civilizations probably would too: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31087746
True, but how many people do we have working on that problem?
Compare to the number of people and years of effort that went into building our modern computing platforms. How much research and investment in a very lucrative field? A quick assessment of my university's finances shows they spend twice as much money per diploma on the sciences vs the arts. (Honestly surprised it's that much, though it does exclude medicine which is twice as much as science)
Then consider the hardware and engineers. Just getting to a bit stream is very complex.
I estimate decoding a modern piece of data would be similar to building our entire computerized technology field very nearly from scratch. In my mind that's several orders of magnitude of effort off.
I would say yes; we go to great lengths to extract information from hard-to-read ancient sources, so future civilizations probably would too: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31087746