US patents on MPEG-2 video compression expired recently, so I took a stab
at a patch adding support for uploading .mpeg/.mpg files containing
MPEG-1/2 material:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/411051/
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T166024
I expect this to be most useful for importing old videos from scientific
papers and web sites (small files), and for archival footage from GLAM
institutions such as digitizations of old SD broadcasts and tips of modern
HD broadcasts (large files) -- importing the original files would avoid
recompression artifacts and save time and effort re-encoding.
A couple concerns and thoughts:
* Most browsers don't display MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 natively, so playback is
completely reliant on the WebM transcodes.
* Small files as found on scientific open access papers seem to import
fine. These would no longer have to be pre-converted to Ogg or WebM before
upload.
* Archival footage from broadcast etc might use MPEG-2 codec but a
different stream format (MPEG-TS) -- if working with GLAMs to get existing
footage, we might need to do more work for processing them. Should
investigate this if there is interest.
* MPEG-2 is the format used for DVDs. Piracy might be a concern, but the
large file size and complex file layout of full length movies may be a
hedge against drive by uploads.
* There are still patents open in the Philippines and Malaysia:
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/M2/Pages/PatentList.aspx -- do we need
to wait for these or is the US patent expiration enough?
-- brion