On 7/20/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Last week I met with John Killy, the COO of the
Mozilla Corporation,
and with Brewster Kahle, ED of the Internet Archive. Mozilla intends
to support video playback in Firefox using the new <video> tag [1],
but such support is not likely to arrive before late 2008 according to
John.
And seamonkey?
The Internet Archive currently does not transcode to
Ogg Theora, but
has a transcoding pipeline in place for other codecs. They have
recently started embedding the Flash-based open source "Flow Player"
for playing back FLV files directly in the browser, and have added FLV
to their transcoding pipeline.
Significant differences between open source and free.
The Archive is happy to support us with video hosting
in any way. If
we can find a useful hosting arrangement with them, they would also be
willing to add Ogg Theora to their transcoding pipeline.
You mean all the problems with using third partly licenses haven't
convinced you that getting involved with people with different aims to
us is a really bad idea?
Imagine that we could easily embed any currently
hosted video from the
Internet Archive into Wikimedia projects, but also make use of their
immense hosting capacity for future video uploads beyond the current
20 MB upload size limit.
Immense hosting capacity? What about bandwidth?
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=archive.org&url=arc…
Video has tremendous potential educational use, and we
should not let
the Wikimedia projects fall behind when it comes to hosting video
content. One should not underestimate the big role that ease of use
played in the success of YouTube: thanks to embedded Flash video,
users no longer had to worry about some plugin possibly hosing their
Windows installation, or about Real Networks' eternal "Buffering ..."
message showing up. It just worked [tm].
We are not interested in competing with youtube.
We must achieve the same ease of use in Wikimedia
projects. In my
opinion, inconveniencing users is the worst possible way to raise
awareness of free content & free software. I therefore propose that
1) we immediately begin serious discussions with the Internet Archive
about hosting some or all of our video content on their servers;
The stuff is under free licences they can host whatever they want. Not
our problem unless they break the terms of the licences.
2) All uploaded videos should be transcoded to at
least Ogg Theora & a
Flash-compatible codec.
Write a patent free codec for flash and we can look into it.
4) We support the open source Flash project Gnash to
ensure that it
can be used for video playback on Wikimedia servers.
As and when they come up with something free of patents.
Having an open source Flash implementation & an
open source Flash
player does not address the patent issues with Flash video, but those
who are concerned about violating software patents (which are not
universally applicable anyway) could still use the provided Theora
files. We could also add a clear message to this effect at the bottom
of every embedded Flash video.
Um the people violateing the patents would be the wikimedia foundation.
Such a solution would be a reasonable compromise
between trying to
provide "free as in speech" video wherever possible, but also
minimizing hassle and maximizing ease of use for typical Windows users
looking for free educational content. We should continue to evangelize
& use Ogg Theora, but not at the expense of usability.
I've seen that argument before. Generaly used by those in favor of
adding copyvios to en.
--
geni