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.

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.

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.

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. As Board member I will certainly continue to push for this to change ASAP.

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). What are you basing the assertion "majority of readers" on?

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. 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.

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.

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.

If they say "No" or "Yes, but ..", we would have a very good reason to reject those codecs. One can never be completely safe from a patent lawsuit, of course, but that applies to any codec, whether it is ostensibly unencumbered or not.

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.

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.

On 7/20/07, Pedro Sanchez pdsanchez@gmail.com wrote:

Uh, using as much "fair use" images is highly desirable. Even for living people where we could get free replacements... since it's easier, and it will immediately improve the experience of our users.

It's a balance between attitudes such as yours and those of people on the opposite end who wish for us to only have free content & free codecs. We should steer clear from dogma and ask ourselves: How do we best meet our goals of building a freely usable encyclopedia?

The use of "phantom images" which encourage upload of freely licensed photographs of celebrities anecdotally seems to have encouraged the creation of free content that would otherwise not have been produced (I'd love to see hard numbers on that). But what do we truly gain if a user who has no experience installing software (or no permission to do so on their system) simply cannot play video or audio on our websites? Arguably, very little: Their motivation to understand the issue of patents in video codecs is unlikely to be positively affected by their inability to play videos on Wiki[mp]edia.

The point is, using flash video akin to using mp3 for sound (since it actually uses mp3 for audio). So, before pushing for flash, push for mp3 first.

In both cases, if we can get a non-aggression agreement from the known patent holders I'd be in favor of transparent transcoding of uploaded files to multiple codecs.

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.

On 7/20/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

If we end up somewhere in the 60-70% success range I guess that's acceptable, but I'd like this confirmed with a reasonable sample of users and an explicit question.

Also, one important thing to check for is whether this level of success is reasonably evenly distributed by origin. If entire countries have trouble playing video, that's still a massive usability problem.

On 7/20/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

In that regard we're already going to be screwed: Without enough bandwidth to transfer the file in a reasonable amount of time video is useless, most of the surface of the earth doesn't have connectivity out there to support video. And all the bandwidth in the world won't help when you're browsing with a 386/33 ... a system which can't play video with any of the formats discussed.

Yes. One could have a YouTube control video, which would probably be a good idea in any case.

Right now the only project which I am sure are using the player are Enwikipedia, and Commons. I understand that it's been copied over to a number of other projects, I've left that up to whomever is interested. It doesn't help that the player isn't localizable (although I reduced the text in it to a minimum, the next version will be).

There's another item for the roadmap ..

I just found out Erik's video thread also exists on Foundation-l. Readers there may want to see the lively discussion on commons-l (http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2007-July/thread.html).

Kelly Martin also has an interesting blog post on the matter at: http://nonbovine-ruminations.blogspot.com/2007/07/peace-love-and-progress-bu...

Continue reading this email to see an interesting point:

On 7/20/07, (on commons-l) geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:

YouTube's TOS conflicts with most free licenses.

YouTube's TOS is pretty bad but they aren't alone.

In YouTube's case having a lot of free content would likely be against their business model: If people can legally duplicate their collection its value to them is reduced. ;)

Here are some hunks of another TOS. I think it's important so please take the time to read it:

"This terms of use agreement (the "Agreement") governs your use of the collection of Web pages and other digital content (the "Collections") available (...). When accessing (a) page, you will be presented with the terms of use agreement. If you do not agree to these terms, please do not use the (...) Collections or its Web site (the "Site"). ... Access to the (...) Collections is provided at no cost to you and is granted for scholarship and research purposes only. ... Some of the content available through the Archive may be governed by local, national, and/or international laws and regulations, and your use of such content is solely at your own risk. You agree to abide by all applicable laws and regulations, including intellectual property laws, in connection with your use of the Archive. In particular, you certify that your use of any part of the Archive's Collections will be noncommercial and will be limited to non infringing or fair use under copyright law. ...

Where did this come from? This is from the TOS for the Internet Archive, the organization Erik would prefer be hosting our video.

Serving large files is technically easy compared to what we are already doing. Our techs don't see a need. ... We have a better recognized name, and more traffic today. I just don't see the justification for hosting anything of ours there.

Collaboration is another matter. No one is opposed to that.

But when Erik meets with the Internet Archive to talk Wikimedia technical stuff without consulting with the board, the community, the technical staff, or even being aware of the current status of our existing video support ... that isn't just isn't how collaboration happens. It was my understanding that Erik was out there for Omegawiki, and not Wikimedia in any case.

It's good if people are able to make visits for us while on other trips: but not if it isn't people with the right information...

On 7/21/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

Gregory, the problem with your position is the fundamental assumption of bad faith that runs through so many of your arguments.

Whether it's Creative Commons 3.0 or a collaboration with the Archive, other organizations are always insufficiently committed to freedom and therefore impossible to collaborate with.

The problem with this kind of free culture isolationism is that dogmatic blindness achieves exactly the opposite of what you are hoping for. It will lead to other projects which haven't spend a minute even thinking about the implications of copyright and file format policies becoming dominant, simply because they choose to adopt mainstream technology and put ease of use before anything else. It will lead to us being overwhelmed and understaffed as we refuse to accept help from anyone who isn't already carrying the same flag we are carrying. We need balance and reason, not dogma and hostility.

Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, Mozilla, and others are very valuable institutions of a broadly defined movement towards making terabytes worth of cultural works available online, reducing barriers to access, providing freely usable & freely licensed tools, developing sane legal frameworks, and so on. I, too, would prefer it if these institutions would generally advocate similarly high standards of freedom as we do, and where this is not the case, I generally try to persuade them to do so.

However, that does not negate their efforts, nor does it mean that we should avoid working with them. We should try to help them when we think they could do better. We should treat them as potential friends and allies, not alienate them with a priori assumptions about their motives and their direction.

Case in point: You argue that the Archive is not a suitable partner because they are currently not supporting Theora. Well, they are already supporting Vorbis for many of their audio collections, and according to Brewster, the main reason for the lack of Theora support is quite simply that there has not been substantial demand for it so far. We, as a partner, could make it quite clear that Theora is a requirement for a collaboration around video hosting. Indeed, I already said as much to Brewster, and he signaled that adding Theora support to their transcoding pipeline would not be much of an issue at all.

If you want to effect policy changes in other organizations, you need to start talking to them! A partnership with WMF would push them towards adopting free formats, because it would be an implicit requirement for such a partnership to happen. Similarly, their Terms of Service were last updated in March 2001, before Creative Commons and others even existed to raise awareness of the importance of licensing and content freedom. I doubt that anyone but the lawyer who wrote the thing even has looked at it since then. Have you tried to send them feedback about it? Once again, _talk_ to people, don't just condemn what they are doing.

It's exactly the same with CC 3.0 and many other issues. Your stance tends to be: "No! These people are doing bad things! We should stay away from them! Don't you dare talk to them!" My position is: If we want our ideas to spread, we need to reach out to others and _convince_ them, not condemn them, as part of the process of collaboration. And, if that process goes both ways, and people in our community are convinced that they are sometimes too militaristic about certain issues, I don't think that would be unhealthy or unhelpful at all.

Yours is a position of rigid, dogmatic isolationism -- not one of open-minded, thoughtful outreach. That's regrettable, and I do not share it, and intend to continue talking to others, listening to them, and trying to reason with them instead. Wikimedia needs to go beyond navel gazing and self-paralysis; it needs to continue to reinvent itself and work with others in achieving its mission of building a global, free culture and achieving free education for all. -- Toward Peace, Love & Progress: Erik

Perhaps you are too ready to assume the worst of your critics by simply dismissing their arguments as dogmatic and unhelpful rather than reading what they say. Don't make the mistake of assuming that because someone does not agree with you on your approach that they don't want your same end goals.

I want to work with people, too. But I don't think that requires compromises such as allowing patent-encumbered video onto the site, and any partnership that requires such things is no benefit to us.

So we should talk, yes, of course, and make proposals, float ideas, find commonality -- and we should also, we *must* also meet those proposals critically according to our own standards. We should not compromise simply to be agreeable when we would not otherwise do so.

Your initial post was not talking about the benefits of talking, sharing ideas, pursuing communication. Your post was a proposal, your subject line a thesis statement. Don't mistake criticism of that proposal for criticism of the wider process.

It's great to come around with a new idea. In this case everyone can see what's good about it, and perhaps that not being mentioned in the thread gives the wrong impression. But I think it is more important, when presented with something with obvious merit, to point out what's wrong with it. A terrible idea isn't worth the time it take to criticize it. An almost-good idea is, because it is attractive enough that if no one points out the flaws they may easily be missed.

On its own, independent of other considerations, making video accessible to more people is good. No one is disputing that. There's no point in even bringing up the point; it's obvious. Sharing resources with organizations that have overlapping goals: also good. No one needs to say this.

There's a nice page on Ward's Wiki, "CriticsAreYourBestFriends" -- http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CriticsAreYourBestFriends. (And I believe that, which is why I like Greg. :-)) I don't think anyone's posts have been saying that we should never work with IA, that we should not treat them in general as allies. But it is simple fact that however strong the overlap, their mission and approach are not the same as ours, and we have to consider those differences with a critical eye even as we would like to make the best of what we have in common, if we care at all about maintaining what we have held to be important.

-Kat

On 7/21/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

Gregory, the problem with your position is the fundamental assumption of bad faith that runs through so many of your arguments. Whether it's Creative Commons 3.0 or a collaboration with the Archive, other organizations are always insufficiently committed to freedom and therefore impossible to collaborate with.

Way to form a character assault Erik. :(

At this point I think I have a right to push on these things.

For video, I've been involved for ages, building actual support software, quietly pushing things along like the progress on WhatWG HTML5 standards, advocating participation.

It's insulting as hell that you just trampled all over the work I've done on video, by running around totally underinformed about the efforts of people other than you and orgs other than ours.

Regarding Creative Commons 3.0: I saw a draft which included the unacceptable language in December 2006. I politely pointed out the flaws in the proposed wording. Out of common courtesy I respected the confidentality of the draft, but even without that factor there was no reason for public discussion at that point.

The flawed language was not included in any of the public drafts which were released later. I thought the matter was resolved. Then the license was released with the problematic language included.

No one from Creative Commons has been willing to comment on the matter in an official capacity, to the best of my knowledge. It's been months since the release. Plenty of time to talk and respond. There is widespread agreement that at best the license is confusing.

As far as I can tell we are easily one of the largest repositories of strongly-free content. For us it's pragmatic and business as usual to say that we won't use it until the issues are addressed, not dogmatic.

hoping for. It will lead to other projects which haven't spend a minute even thinking about the implications of copyright and file format policies becoming dominant, simply because they choose to adopt mainstream technology and put ease of use before anything else. It

Yet we are the 800-pound gorilla in some spaces today, even given the limitations we have chosen.

There are many risks we face, but we must analyze them carefully and weigh them. We must treat our peers with respect, but we can not make decisions based on the friends we'll be able to claim by simply appeasing people whose goals diverge from ours.

If you think that video support and cc-by-(sa)-3.0 are really our biggest risk factors, you have wildly misplaced priorities. They are both minor areas.

No one in the video space is honestly competing with us in our core business space... and the overwhelming majority of CC license users are using licenses we don't accept because they are clearly incompatible with our goals.

Meanwhile, other projects like CZ might actually solve the terrible quality consistency problems we have... As a reader that's what would make me switch favorite encyclopedias... not a six-month delay in accepting cc-by-*-3.0.

[snip]

I, too, would prefer it if these institutions would generally advocate similarly high standards of freedom as we do, and where this is not the case, I generally try to persuade them to do so.

Often what they do is perfectly right considering their goals. I don't think our business should be to persuade them. We should speak clearly about where we stand and look for commonalities.

We also shouldn't walk in completely misinformed. I know you mean well, Erik, but the reality is that you have your own agenda, one which has much in common with mine, and with Wikimedia's, but I am not so foolish to think it is the same.

[snip]

and allies, not alienate them with a priori assumptions about their motives and their direction.

Where did I say that anyone has a bad motive?

Some people don't have the same motives that we do, that doesn't make them bad. There is more than one right answer to many problems, and neither I nor WE are so bright to have the right solutions to everything.

Case in point: You argue that the Archive is not a suitable partner because they are currently not supporting Theora.

Cite? I've given a half dozen reaons why there is no cause to host video there. So have several Wikimedians and Wikimedia employees. Are we all guilty of insulting the Archive?

If you want to effect policy changes in other organizations, you need to start talking to them!

Indeed. Yet the board was unresponsive when I asked for permission to approach Mozilla on the matter of format support a year ago. Eventually the message that I, and Mdale, wanted to bring got brought to them through other avenues.

[snip]

Have you tried to send them feedback about it? Once again, _talk_ to people, don't just condemn what they are doing.

I didn't condemn it. They are a library. It's fantastic work. It's not the same as our work. Their TOS has been raised before, but perhaps not in the right forums.

And of course I'd love to talk to them about it, but your like to harbor meetings with technical projects for yourself, often holding them under the guise of your other projects... You do not invite other Wikimedia folks to attend in most cases, or even ask for input from other Wikimedia folks before these.

(Easy examples being your meetings with Encyclopedia of Earth, and the recent meeting with the Internet Archive.)

It's exactly the same with CC 3.0 and many other issues. Your stance tends to be: "No! These people are doing bad things! We should stay away from them! Don't you dare talk to them!"

Don't you dare misrepresent me like that Erik. You know that is untrue. The only reason I have suggested that we reject the licenses is that they refuse to talk to us.

[remove insults]

That's regrettable, and I do not share it,

I'm glad I'm different than you. I regret you can't find more polite language to discuss our differences. If your words were not just selected to spite me then you misunderstand me greatly... Perhaps I misunderstand you as well, but we aren't going to advance by hurling insults.

On 7/21/07, Joichi Ito jito@neoteny.com wrote:

I'm sorry this happened. I'll look into how this happened, but my understanding was that the language that was used was what was in the draft.

If it was the language in the public drafts during 2007 I am gravely mistaken and owe an apology.

It *was* the language in a Dec 2006 draft I was given privately. Because I did not see the language in later drafts I believed it was dropped from consideration, I was in error to make that assumption regardless of anything else that went on.

An example draft: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-licenses/2007-February/005013.html

Even if this isn't confusion on my part, then this still isn't the end of the world.

There does appear to be a widespread belief that the current language is confusing, so I can't say that I'll be too happy if the end result is nothing more than to agree to disagree, but I am happy to see some progress. ;)

Thanks for your attention.

-- Greg

On 21/07/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

Again, this seems like a case of being quick to condemn and reluctant to communicate. I believe we can work with the Archive and make sure that free formats become "first class citizens" in everything we do with them.

What is the benefit of working with "the Archive"? Wikimedia already posses the capability to host videos, anyone with a computer that runs a OGG player or Java (nearly all systems) can play our video, and, as Greg points out, if there is clear consensus it is possible to integrate video into pages with little effort. Personally I think that would be unwise, although that is simply my opinion.

Just talk to me. I do tend to announce all my meetings on internal-l days if not weeks before they happen, unlike any other Wikimedian I know. This particular discussion was unplanned, which sometimes happens and should also be fine, but there are no firm outcomes as of yet. I can make an introduction to Brewster anytime you want.

Why interal-l? Surely, as a board member, you should be communicating with the wider community. A mssage on foundation-l wouldn't be that hard to do.

-UH.

Just briefly: Trying on my machine at work (no admin rights here whatsoever...)

Apollo 15 liftoff from the Moon.ogg * Firefox 2.0.0.5 does not play at all * Opera 9.2.2 plays using Java, but the time display is broken, and I can't operate the slider (always on maximum) * Same on IE7

YouTube works just fine...

IMHO there is a simple solution. All our videos are free and can be reused, right? So, /another site/ could automatically download all out videos and convert them to Flash/whatever. And we could link to this site, "in case you cat'n see the video". The Java player is on the toolserver already.

Now, the Internet Archive could host that, right? Or Wikia. Or Google or Yahoo. Doesn't really matter, as long as we maintain good relations with them, so they won't drown their pages in ads, and link back to our ogg files.

Cheers, Magnus

On 7/20/07, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

On 7/20/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:

...

The addition of the transcoding infrastructure alone would be a substantial project with substantial complexity...

IA has already got the infrastructure in place.

That isn't exactly the sort of infrastructure I was thinking of, but this is an interesting subject:

Indeed, they have a lot of transcoding infrastructure in place... Yet they don't offer their video content in free formats. They do offer four or five encumbered formats in many cases, but they seldom offer free formats at all.

It's certainly not that they haven't been asked to offer unencumbered formats.

I don't think it's wise of you to to hold up IA as example of something done right here, although I am glad you did because it makes my argument easier.

You have been advocating parallel distribution in free and non-free formats, an action which I and others have argued is inconsistent with our long-term mission social good, but it is an action which is at least worth discussion. But IA doesn't manage to even do this much.

The practice of providing proprietary formats only, or otherwise leaving free formats as second-class citizens, is exactly the sort of negative outcome that someone might use in a strawman argument against parallel distribution. Except in this case, it's not a strawman -- it's IA's actual behavior.

So, as you pitch using the IA as a way of achieving the future, please realize that you're showing us a future which doesn't live up to your claims and which epitomizes some of the fears of those who disagree with you.