Dear Gilles, Brion, and Michael,
Thank you for the fast replies. And thanks again to Fabrice for sharing the roadmap for the next months.
Making it easy for people to convert from encumbered to unencumbered formats, and to share media under a free license even if they cannot understand encodings, are unambiguously part of our mission. That part does not seem controversial, though how best to make this happen is debated. The framing of the RFC made it hard to discuss transcoding in any detail.
Brion writes:
As Gilles mentioned, based on the RfC results we don't currently have a server-side solution on the table.
A strict reading of that discussion might mean that we shouldn't store and process encumbered codecs ourselves. Nevertheless, as suggested a few times there, we can at the very least channel uploaders through a server-side solution that isn't hosted on our servers.
Michael Dale writes:
[ snip many insightful things ]
The user should upload the source asset, the server should do the encoding.
Agreed.
Internet archive would be a good partner.
Yes, and I believe they are willing. What might a transparent hand-off to them look like on our side? If we sketch out what this might look like in practice, community members who care about transcoding could organize a related, low-drama discussion about it on Commons. It should be possible to get such a process accepted by IArchivists, Wikimedians, and even Linksvayers.
Sam
( One possibility: Detecting that the format can't be uploaded directly, passing the upload to IA, conversion to an unencumbered format, and upload-to-Commons with metadata mapping. Depending on the size of the file, the uploader could "complete" the upload before the file is available for use, and be asked to come back in a few minutes. But the summary page, a link to the partner archive page, and the filename for use in other WM projects, could be available right away. )