http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/decoding-the-html-5-video-c…
Huh, I got quoted (from the WHATWG list), and my quote even got
illustrated with a lolcat:
In an e-mail on the WHATWG list, Wikimedia Foundation volunteer
media contact David Gerard said that the organization is also
interested in helping Mozilla to raise general awareness of the
advantages that unencumbered video would bring to the Internet.
"I'd also point out that Wikimedia has vast publicity abilities in
this direction," he wrote. "And we're watching the progress of Theora
and Dirac on a day-by-day basis, for obvious reasons. So if you need
large charitable organisations to help you with making this the
obvious publicity choice for a happy Internet with cute fluffy
kitties, I can tell you we'll be right there!"
[image of cute fluffy kittie]
(The "we" I was thinking of was Foundation staff and volunteers
interested in the video efforts, and Commons regulars.)
Greg Maxwell and I have been posting to the mailing list to push Ogg
Theora. I mean, H.264 is technically marvellous and it'd be a lovely
choice, but it's known patent encumbrances - and that MPEG-LA enforce
them - make it *radioactive* for our purposes.
It's IMO futile pushing much harder on the list - Hixie's the editor,
it's his decision, he's an honorable fellow and he's decided he really
can't honestly put Ogg Theora in the spec at present. So it goes back
to pushing Ogg Theora as the de facto format for the web.
- d.
As you may know I have been working on firefogg integration with
mediaWiki. As you may also know the mwEmbed library is being designed to
support embedding of these interfaces in arbitrary external contexts. I
wanted to quickly highlight a useful stand alone usage example of the
library:
http://www.firefogg.org/make/advanced.html
This "Make Ogg" link will be something you can send to a person so they
can encode source footage to a local ogg video file with the latest and
greatest ogg encoders (presently the thusnelda theora encoder & vorbis
audio). Updates to thusnelda and other free codecs will be pushed out
via firefogg updates.
For commons / wikimedia usage we will directly integrate firefogg (using
that same codebase) You can see an example of how that works on the
'new-upload' branch here:
http://sandbox.kaltura.com/testwiki/index.php/Special:Upload ...
hopefully we will start putting some of this on testing.wikipedia.org
~soonish ?~
The new-upload branch feature set is quite extensive including the
script-loader, jquery javascript refactoring, the new upload-api, new
mv_embed video player, add media wizard etc. Any feedback and specific
bug reports people can do will be super helpful in gearing up for
merging this 'new-upload' branch.
For an overview see:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Media_Projects_Overview
peace,
--michael
All,
I'm very happy to announce that the Ford Foundation has awarded a
$300,000 grant to the Wikimedia Foundation to improve our interfaces
and workflows for multimedia uploading. Press release here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Ford_Foundatio…
For the first time we're also sharing a full grant proposal, with
permission of the Ford Foundation. You can find it here:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f9/WMF_Ford_Multimedia_P…
It should give you a good idea about what we can do within the scope
of this project. As a brief recap, Michael Dale has already done some
good work on external repository searches and transfers, and
integration of uploading into the editing UI, so we're hoping to build
on top of this to really get the workflow for
licensing/upload/review/embedding of media files nailed.
We've also been having initial discussions with some of the Wikimedia
chapters about possible models for working together on the execution
of this. For example, we want to make sure that we can facilitate
fruitful face-to-face meetings with Commons practitioners, and there
is plenty of technical work to be done that can be decentralized and
shared. Exciting projects like Wikimedia Germany's investment in
multilingual search are already underway, so hopefully over the next
year, we'll see lots of useful activity culminating in genuine
improvements for Commons and beyond.
Big thanks to Sara Crouse and Naoko Komura for their work on this
grant proposal, and of course to the Ford Foundation for funding it.
:-) Wikimedia Commons deserves to grow to many more millions of free
educational media files, and hopefully this strategic investment will
help us to get there.
All best,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate