On 7/20/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 7/20/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
By doing so we lose the ability to offer a complete record of our content, and and the ability to offer easy 'one stop' duplication of our collection for backup and other purposes.
http://download.wikimedia.org/
Image tarballs There are currently no image dumps available. Check back in mid-2007.
Yes indeed. In fact I understand that our own internal backup situation for images isn't much better than the dumps...
But by your argument we should shut down enwiki and hand it off to archive.org: After all, our dumps are highly unreliable: there is a new partial set one from the 16th, but before then and for some time back there was no dump at all.
We don't seem to be doing very well on this front one way or another. The Internet Archive _specializes_ on redundant, fail-safe archiving. I'm sure providing easy ways to access all uploaded videos would be much easier for them than it is for us.
We need redundant fail safe storage etc for our images as well. We're failing. The solution is to stop failing, not hand over the ropes to someone else.
A lot of the content that Archive.org hosts would be deleted on commons for copyright reasons. Historically they have handled copyright by exception rather than proactively.
It's an _archive_. Their point is to slurp up as much material as possible. It's wonderful that an organization with this purpose exists which is willing to push the limits of what is permissible under copyright law, and if we only push free content to them, rather than adopting their criteria for inclusion, their mission in no way denigrates ours. We could selectively whitelist some of their collections as being acceptable for use within our projects.
What they do is their business and I wish them luck. At the same time, we're here to create content which provides freedom, not get into pissing matches with copyright holders.
Yet some members of our development staff do not respond to emails about video playback support in Mediawiki.
By "some members of our development staff", do you mean Tim or Brion? ;-) Let's face it, we don't currently have the staff support to go much beyond just keeping the sites running.
Tim.
Where have you been? :) We now have automatic in browser playback that works for a majority of readers without downloading anything additional.
We still don't support embedding video directly into articles (the Archive has a nice implementation where the player loads in the brower once you click the preview).
We could have in about 15 minutes- 20 minutes, I'm not kidding. I'm not a fan of inline players because they mess up layout. No one has asked me for it so I've avoided doing it.
What are you basing the assertion "majority of readers" on?
Our popup "(>) play in browser" system loads a launch page off a box with an access log. Due to java security it also fetches the video through a proxy on the same system. We can tell if the player worked for an IP if the same IP both fetches the launch page and completes a media file.
Previously it worked for 81-82% of the people who clicked the play button. I pulled yesterdays numbers and it was only 72%. Both are still clearly a majority. :) This is in the same general range as flash penetration, at least for flash 8+... and it's way better than before I setup the player: about 0% could just click a theora file and play it ;)
I made some changes to the player autodectection code a few weeks ago, so I suspect I botched detection for some users, resulting in the decline rather than an actual change in browser abilities. If thats the case it's entirely my fault: I put out the last set of detection changes without much testing. :(
Obviously the viewer numbers are a bit self-selecting: If it didn't work before people are less likely to try it later. But even on day one I had success levels well over 50% and it works for a lot more people now. Also, much of our traffic is drive by, which should reduce the memory effect.
Jeez Erik. With the exception of flash we already have that. *Including* HTML5 <video/> support, which works in Opera.
It does? I'm using Opera 9.2, and it only shows me the Java player.
You need the 9.5 beta, which I think is still windows only. It works fine in Wine however.
Which does work, though it initially showed me a tiny version of the video (and the full video on reload). My experience with Java applets has generally been very negative, with memory usage and initialization time often being prohibitively high, and debugging for different platforms being very difficult.
Java is strongly disliked in most of the Linux using crowd, the overwhelming majority of Linux users don't have it installed. For them the VLC, and Application/Ogg support should take up the slack. (Both are preferred by the player over Java if they appear to be available)
I am not a Java fan. If you know some java fans, please send them to me so I can pawn off any Java coding that I need. That said, it's a norm in the Windows using world, especially for folks more on the bussiness apps and academics than the web games side of the browsing spectrum.
We should carefully look at the experience of the vast majority of users who are a) on Windows, b) use Internet Explorer or the default install of Firefox. I would also bet that most of them don't have Java installed, but it seems hard to get numbers on that. Being able to play video directly in the article being viewed is also highly desirable.
Most of the people who hit play have Java. 84% of the plays come from Windows users. 72% are not using Firefox.
We can have exact numbers for Java support for anyone who hits 'play', but I don't have them now because of caching and Java being the least preferred. At the very minimum it is over 50% (since half the IPs are loading the JAR for the player).
Right now I believe the player still tends to work better for joe-average Windows user than joe average techno-dork, but thats only an educated guess.
It needs to improve, but to claim that we're causing a huge hassle for the sake of supporting free formats really isn't supported by what I'm seeing.
Wikimedia is in the US. How do you propose we pay the licensing fees for the codec patents we are using, should we be presented with a bill?
I think we should simply ask the current patent holders whether they would grant us non-commercial rights to use the relevant codecs. Yes, such rights won't trickle down to third parties, but we would offer the Theora files and promote Theora for this reason. The right could be time-limited, and renegotiated regularly.
So will we also be asking for a free copy of MS [[SharePoint]] so we finally have WYSIWYG editing by allowing people to edit pages in Microsoft .doc format? :) Not a serious question of course, but one should ask where the line is with your suggested thinking.
I don't think we should distribute our content using any licenses or technology which we can't make available to others. Thats been our legacy, and there are strong arguments for it.
Doing so is a violation of the spirit of any copyleft license, since you've encumbered a copy of the work, if not the actual terms. I know you're not a fan of copyleft, but it is what it is.
If someone doesn't step forward and push for unencoumbered formats
I'm 100% in support of "pushing unencumbered formats", but not at the expense of usability for the majority of users.
Majority? If thats the criteria then we already passed it when I created the in browser player.
I'd like to see it work better and for more people... and there is a lot of development still going on. (For example, I will very soon have the Java mode displaying video at the right sizes).
I don't personally agree that there is any percentage of users who can't view it that makes it okay to compromise freedom: If people can't view it we should spend effort making it work without the compromise, making the world a place where people can freely share knowledge without format taxes.
...As it turns out, however, what we have is working for a lot of people. So thats an argument we shouldn't have to have.
We already have a solution that works for a lot of Windows users without installing anything most don't already have. (Flash isn't installed by default in Windows either.. but most have it. Java penetration isn't quite as deep, but for our readers it does remarkably well)
I'd love to see hard data on this. Failing any already existing data, a large scale video survey on our projects could be a good first step.
All you had to do was ask... :) I don't have more than two days of logs for the bounce page loads, but I do have them going back to March for successful media plays.
Yesterday 24313 out of 33907 distinct IPs that pressed the play button completed playing a media file with the in-browser player. (this traffic level is historically low but there is a lot of day to day variance)
Since march 1,519,989 distinct IPs have successfully played a media file with the in browser player I operate. The total number of files played in that span is 4,103,018. (I can't say attempts over that span, alas, due to a lack of logs).
Is there room for improvement? Hell yes. But thus far I've been going at this alone.
Do we need to compromise freedom to improve things? No.
Do we need to compromise freedom to support lots of people? We already do without any compromise in freedom.
Cheers.