On 3/6/07, Edward Z. Yang edwardzyang@thewritingpot.com wrote:
I think this is a great idea and should definitely be investigated. However:
- Encoding audio in a lossless codec seems, at least from my
experience, to be a very CPU intensive process. WIth our equipment, this may or may not be a problem.
Ogg/Flac is very fast, especially on the decode side. My laptop can convert a flac to an Ogg/Vorbis file at 45x real time. Given your point below and my cpu speed, which I hadn't thought of.. I wouldn't expect any transcode to take more than 10 seconds. ;) But, that will have to be fixed.
At some point we'll want to transcode video and for all I could argue that transcoding audio is fairly cheap, transcoding video is far less...
- If we encourage losslessly compressed audio, we will probably want to
increase our maximum upload size. Longer audio clips will easily exceed 20 MB, and Spoken Wikipedia usually *must* split up their audio files in order to upload them in (whether for better or worse). This also runs up with some of HTTPs limitations when it comes to file uploads. An anonymous FTP server would be pretty neat, but I doubt it's going to happen.
Ugh. This is a point that we'll have to address. This is an issue without lossless upload but more of one with it.