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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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; 2) All uploaded videos should be transcoded to at least Ogg Theora & a Flash-compatible codec. 3) we add video support to MediaWiki that will, as intelligently as possible, fall back to any of the following methods - embedded open source Flash player - Java player - VLC plugin - (in the future) <video> support. 4) We support the open source Flash project Gnash to ensure that it can be used for video playback on Wikimedia servers.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-video.ht...