Greetings!
The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team seeks your guidance on a proposal to support the MP4 video format. As you know, this digital video standard is used widely around the world to record, edit and watch videos on mobile phones, desktop computers and home video devices. It is also known as H.264/MPEG-4 or AVC. (1)
Supporting the MP4 format would make it much easier for our users to view and contribute video on Wikimedia projects -- and video files could be offered in dual formats on our sites, so we could continue to support current open formats (WebM and Ogg Theora).
However, MP4 is a patent-encumbered format, and using a proprietary format would be a departure from our current practice of only supporting open formats on our sites -- even though the licenses appear to have acceptable legal terms, with only a small fee required.
We would appreciate your guidance on whether or not we should support MP4 on our sites. The Request for Comments presents views both in favor and against MP4 support, based on opinions we’ve heard in our discussions with community and team members.
What do you think? We would be grateful for your comments here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video
All users are welcome to participate, whether you are active on Commons, Wikipedia, other Wikimedia project -- or any site that uses content from our free media repository.
We look forward to a constructive discussion with you and other community members, so we can make a more informed decision together about this important question.
All the best,
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation
Multimedia Team Hub: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia
(1) About MP4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4
Hello again,
Many thanks to all of you who have contributed to our Request for Comments about whether or not to support the MP4 video format.
Many interesting comments have been posted already, with views both in favor and against MP4 support. If you haven’t commented yet, we would appreciate your guidance as well:
What do you think? We would be grateful for your comments here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video
We also invite you to join our Office Hours Chat on IRC today, January 16, at 19:00 UTC, if you would like to discuss this project with our team and other community members:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours
We look forward to a constructive discussion with you and your community, so we can make a more informed decision together about this important question.
All the best,
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia
On Jan 15, 2014, at 4:59 PM, Fabrice Florin fflorin@wikimedia.org wrote:
Greetings!
The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team seeks your guidance on a proposal to support the MP4 video format. As you know, this digital video standard is used widely around the world to record, edit and watch videos on mobile phones, desktop computers and home video devices. It is also known as H.264/MPEG-4 or AVC. (1)
Supporting the MP4 format would make it much easier for our users to view and contribute video on Wikimedia projects -- and video files could be offered in dual formats on our sites, so we could continue to support current open formats (WebM and Ogg Theora).
However, MP4 is a patent-encumbered format, and using a proprietary format would be a departure from our current practice of only supporting open formats on our sites -- even though the licenses appear to have acceptable legal terms, with only a small fee required.
We would appreciate your guidance on whether or not we should support MP4 on our sites. The Request for Comments presents views both in favor and against MP4 support, based on opinions we’ve heard in our discussions with community and team members.
What do you think? We would be grateful for your comments here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video
All users are welcome to participate, whether you are active on Commons, Wikipedia, other Wikimedia project -- or any site that uses content from our free media repository.
We look forward to a constructive discussion with you and other community members, so we can make a more informed decision together about this important question.
All the best,
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation
Multimedia Team Hub: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia
(1) About MP4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin Product Manager Wikimedia Foundation
Hello everyone,
I wanted to let you know that our Request for Comments on whether or not to support MP4 Video ends tomorrow.
If you haven’t participated in this discussion yet, we invite you to add your comments here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video
This RfC will be closed tomorrow by a Commons bureaucrat. Once the RfC is closed, the multimedia team will discuss next steps for video support based on community feedback, and we will post an update in coming weeks.
Thanks to all of you who have participated in this RfC. We appreciate your guidance on complex issues like these.
Regards as ever,
Fabrice
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation
multimedia@lists.wikimedia.org