Greetings!
The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team (1) seeks your guidance on a proposal to support the MP4 video format. 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. (2)
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).
Currently, open video files cannot be viewed on many mobile devices or web browsers without extra software, making it difficult or impossible for several hundred million monthly visitors to watch videos on our sites. And video contributions are also limited by the fact that most mobile phones and camcorders record video only in MP4 format, and that transcoding software is scarce and hard to use by casual users.
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 to support MP4 on our sites. The Request for Comments presents views both in favor and against MP4 support, and over 450 community members have already posted their recommendations.
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 projects -- or any site that uses content from our free media repository. So we also invite you to spread the word in your community about this issue.
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
(1) Multimedia Team Hub: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia
(2) About MP4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4
On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 7:20 PM, Fabrice Florin wrote:
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).
I am sorry, I know this is not the place for the debate, but you expose here an unilateral and biased view, in fact supporting MP4 can do real harm to the open web, by weakening the really free/open alternatives.
Currently, open video files cannot be viewed on many mobile devices or web browsers without extra software, making it difficult or impossible for several hundred million monthly visitors to watch videos on our sites.
Then let's lobby the device makers to support the open formats, it won't add any cost for them but provide more value for their customers.
I'm shutting my mouth now and go talk/vote in the proper place :)
wikilovesmonuments@lists.wikimedia.org