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