Update on Brion's work with video is below. Brion says he can join us next
month on the 8th or 17th.
Also FYI, Peaceray's second part of his Wikimania series appears in this
week's Signpost issue.
If there is enough interest we can have a "general meeting" on the 8th
(probably including Brion's presentation) and hopefully a 2nd event on the
17th with the Wing Luke Museum. Otherwise we can plan on meeting just with
Wing Luke.
I'd appreciate hearing if there is interest on having two meetups in
September. If you're interested in meeting on the 8th as well as the 17th
please email me off list so that I can get a sense of likely attendance on
the 8th as well as possible agenda items for the 8th.
Thanks!
Pine
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Brion Vibber" <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Aug 15, 2015 2:44 AM
Subject: [Multimedia] Prep work for WebM VP9 support
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Multimedia Team"
<multimedia(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>,
"Opportunities for video in the Wikimedia universe - tech help" <
wikivideo-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc:
Just a quick note -- there's been some ongoing work in preparation for
supporting WebM with the newer VP9 codec:
* fixing up our server configuration with updated ffmpeg & ffmpeg2theora
packages
* fixing up the player to support VP9 as well as VP8
* adding support for producing WebM transcodes in VP9 in addition to VP8
Big thanks to a bunch of folks over on the ops side who have been helping
with the packaging! We had to backport some packages to get VP9 working,
and ffmpeg2theora needed some patches to work correctly in newer versions.
At some point in the coming weeks, the video transcoding servers will
be re-imaged
with an updated operating system <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T104747>
(Ubuntu Trusty plus our custom packages). Once this is complete, uploaded
WebM VP9 files should start producing Ogg Theora and WebM VP8 transcodes
(currently you can upload them but they fail to work).
With TMH updates going out some time next week, playback of VP9 originals
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T62272> should also start working in
Chrome and Firefox.
These updates also improve support of Opus audio files
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T42193>, both standalone in Ogg audio
and in WebM videos.
Once we're satisfied everything works, we'll consider enabling production
of VP9 transcodes <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T63805>. These will be
about the same quality as VP8, but use only half the bandwidth. Later when
we figure out how to rig up adaptive streaming, this'll mean
bandwidth-constrained clients can bump up one resolution step in VP9 versus
VP8...
One big warning -- VP9 encoding is 2-4x slower than VP8 encoding at the
same resolution... so we'll have to investigate comparative CPU load and
whether 1080p transcodes actually complete reliably before timeouts etc
hit. This may be something we have to roll out later after more testing.
But even if it takes us time to get VP9 output working, having VP9 input
functional will fix some existing files, make it easier to import from
YouTube and other sources that are more aggressively using VP9, and
generally makes us more future-proof.
-- brion
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