On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 6:06 PM, James Forrester <jforrester@wikimedia.org> wrote:Where in this new process could someone hook in a widget that catches attempts to upload proprietary formats, and sends the file behind the scenes to Internet Archive for transcoding?
Ha. Well, that's an awkward policy question (and so my responsibility) wrapped inside a technical one (and so Mark's). :-)I'm sure that such a hook could already be written for UploadWizard, though ideally it'd be done properly with a type handler; the transcoding effort, however, would mean that we would not store the original, so there'd need to be a challenging community discussion about whether retaining the original was important. It'd also be a pretty fragile system compared to doing the transcoding ourselves, without significant moral, ethical or legal gains as far as I can see, so I'd need to be convinced that it was worth spending so much effort on. But "inside it somewhere" isn't a great answer, I'm afraid.That discussion already happened, see Commons:Project_scope#Must_be_an_allowable_free_file_format and Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video - there are strong objections to storing or transcoding originals files which have a proprietary format, at least in the current legal and policy landscape.