Greetings!
The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team seeks your guidance on a proposal to
support the MP4 video format. As you know, this digital video standard is used widely
around the world to record, edit and watch videos on mobile phones, desktop computers and
home video devices. It is also known as H.264/MPEG-4 or AVC. (1)
Supporting the MP4 format would make it much easier for our users to view and contribute
video on Wikimedia projects -- and video files could be offered in dual formats on our
sites, so we could continue to support current open formats (WebM and Ogg Theora).
However, MP4 is a patent-encumbered format, and using a proprietary format would be a
departure from our current practice of only supporting open formats on our sites -- even
though the licenses appear to have acceptable legal terms, with only a small fee required.
We would appreciate your guidance on whether or not we should support MP4 on our sites.
The Request for Comments presents views both in favor and against MP4 support, based on
opinions we’ve heard in our discussions with community and team members.
What do you think? We would be grateful for your comments here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video
All users are welcome to participate, whether you are active on Commons, Wikipedia, other
Wikimedia project -- or any site that uses content from our free media repository.
We look forward to a constructive discussion with you and other community members, so we
can make a more informed decision together about this important question.
All the best,
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation
Multimedia Team Hub:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia
(1) About MP4:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)