On 7/19/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
A Flash video player that works in Gnash is within reach - the YouTube player now works in Gnash.
And Gnash is clearly violating at least 7 patents in the process: Legal flash video is out of reach anywhere software patents are valid because the only formats that can work in flash 8 require heavily and indisputably patent encumbered formats.
In flash 9 it is, at least theoretically, possible to code support for unencumbered formats... but no one has done it yet.
It's also less relevant these days: The player we have today supports four different playback methods (Java, VLC plugin, Application/OGG plugin, and HTML 5 video tag), and at least one of these works for the overwhelming majority of *readers* (I know not nor care not about Wikipedia regulars, they can install their own players) who attempt to view video on our site.
With the huge victory of Ogg/Theora being made the baseline for HTML5 video (due to the need to have a basic unencumbered format universally available), we can expect the situation to improve far more in the next two cycles of browser development. (Opera beta already has HTML5 video tag support, and FireFox keeps toying with it but hasn't made a public commitment about when they'll ship).
Now that we have working playback for most readers, I think it's safe to say that our limiting factors are someplace else at this point.
Personally I don't enjoy doing videos much because it takes more work to get a less polished (and on our projects right now, appreciated) result.
For example, this cruddy video took many minutes to create while the still took seconds. The video is more informative but it just doesn't look well done. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Electronic_lock_yl88_operation.ogg