Hey multimedia lovers and fellow devs!
WMF legal seems happy with the state of the expired MP3 patents, so we've
got drafts of a couple discussion prompts for two ends of "the MP3 problem":
Planning whether/how to restrict or add tooling to support review of MP3
file uploads:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:CKoerner_(WMF)/MP3_patrol_discussion
Creating MP3 conversions of existing audio files for playback in
Safari/IE/Edge/mobile:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Brion_Vibber_(WMF)/MP3_output_discu…
I'd like us to be moving forward with these soon, so if there's any
suggestions for or concerns about the discussion prompts before we start
Officially Proposing Things To The Commons Community, please speak up!
(Both pages link to phab tickets, feel free to review or comment on those
too.)
-- brion
Due to ongoing issues with ffmpeg2theora & upcoming server upgrades, I'm
planning to accelerate our migration from Ogg Theora video output to WebM
VP8: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T172445
== When will it change? ==
Sometime in August 2017 as schedules permit, unless surprises pop up in
final testing.
== What will change? ==
Folks using Chrome and Firefox may not notice any difference -- these
browsers have used native WebM playback by default for some time. "Ogg"
will disappear from the list of optionally-playable and downloadable
formats.
In Safari, IE, or Edge where the 'ogv.js' compatibility shim is used, you
will see videos automatically show up in WebM mode instead of Ogg mode.
There is a tradeoff: higher quality & lower bandwidth use, but higher CPU
usage. On very slow computers or at very high resolutions, you may hit CPU
limits at one resolution step lower than with Ogg.
== Why are we making this change? ==
* Eventually we need to go to WebM to support adaptive streaming, so this
was always planned for the long term...
* For best quality we use an unreleased version of libogg and
ffmpeg2theora, but there are still some bugs in there and we routinely get
reports of odd hangs or crashes.
* Ops is updating the servers, and continuing to maintain the custom
packages that are still crashy is getting to be problematic.
* Dropping the Ogg format for video will free up disk space and and CPU
time, and should result in faster turnaround for derived file generation.
== What about Ogg audio? ==
Ogg is still being used for audio, and will not be affected.
-- brion