Out of curiosity, is there any plan to move audio to opus at some point? (As someone not super well versed) it looks like a superior codec by every measure, and browser support appears similar.
--
brian
On Thursday, August 3, 2017, Brion Vibber <bvibber@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 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