In the next couple weeks I'm planning to start switching our video
transcode output from WebM VP8/Vorbis to the newer WebM VP9/Opus profile,
which saves us about 38% on file size and bandwidth while retaining the
same quality.
This will not affect what kinds of files you upload; only the scaled
transcoded output files used for playback will change. All modern browsers
that support VP8 support VP9 as well, and our player shim for Safari and IE
will continue to work.
All the details:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TimedMediaHandler/VP9_transition
Comments and questions welcome!
-- brion
<tl;dr>: Read https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/Mentors and
add your name to the mentors table and start tagging #GCI-2018 tasks.
We'll need MANY mentors and MANY tasks, otherwise we cannot make it.
Google Code-in is an annual contest for 13-17 year old students. It
will take place from Oct23 to Dec13. It's not only about coding:
we also need tasks about design, docs, outreach/research, QA.
Last year, 300 students worked on 760 tasks supported by 51 mentors.
For some achievements from last round, see
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/03/20/wikimedia-google-code-in-2017/
While we wait whether Wikimedia will get accepted:
* You have small, self-contained bugs you'd like to see fixed?
* Your documentation needs specific improvements?
* Your user interface has some smaller design issues?
* Your Outreachy/Summer of Code project welcomes small tweaks?
* You'd enjoy helping someone port your template to Lua?
* Your gadget code uses some deprecated API calls?
* You have tasks in mind that welcome some research?
Note that "beginner tasks" (e.g. "Set up Vagrant") and generic
tasks are very welcome (like "Choose and fix 2 PHP7 issues from
the list in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120336" style).
We also have more than 400 unassigned open #easy tasks listed:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/HCyOonSbFn.z/#R
Can you mentor some of those tasks in your area?
Please take a moment to find / update [Phabricator etc.] tasks in your
project(s) which would take an experienced contributor 2-3 hours. Read
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/Mentors
, ask if you have any questions, and add your name to
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/2018#List_of_Wikimedia_mentors
(If you have mentored before and have a good overview of our
infrastructure: We also need more organization admins! See
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/Admins )
Thanks (as we cannot run this without your help),
andre
--
Andre Klapper | ak-47(a)gmx.net
https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/