I do not understand why the file format rule http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_format_policy was not made months ago when it was put online.
When Anthere put it online it was clear to all with open eyes that it is already the way of our project and that it must stay to keep our project free.
The only argument come from staff of wikimedia. When they move to San Francisco most expensive city in the world they said they would partner with similar minded organizations. I wonder then how there can be similar minds in a place so different to most of the editors. I see now: similar minds speaks of people who exploit the public like youtube, "myspace" and kaltura.
Now Anthere is gone and the rule is still not approved. Frieda is gone. There will be no rule to prevent the staff from abusing my work to take my freedom to make themselves more powerful and wealthy. The community no longer have a voice. With wikimedia new San Francisco USA mind they seem to not care for the reasons which made Wikipedia different. Wikipedia is now bigger, better than encyclopedias and many people write it without being paid but that was never the reason for Wikipedia. Wikipedia means freedom of the mind.
On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 5:10 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
As I see that there are a number of well introduced people in this matter, I want just to give the input from my experience (I am an admin at the company which archives media and doing press clipping).
- For us, Flash was never an option, while WMV, MPEG (1 and 2) and
OGG/Theora are. Note that the company in which I am working has to adapt to their customers. Simply, no one of customers wants Flash. (BTW, MPEG 1 and 2 are useful because there are hardware encoders on ["hardware"] TV cards. WMV is useful because of the possibility to make a very small video file.)
- There are VLC, MPlayer and similar plugins for web browsers which
allow watching video [from browsers]. It makes usage of OGG/Theora format similar to usage of Flash ("click here to download the plugin").
- It is already mentioned that HTML5 will have <video> tag and that
Firefox 3.1 supports it.
From this perspective, I don't see a reason why to adopt Flash *now*. It was an option few years ago, but there is no need for that now. If some free software is not stable enough now (like VLC or MPlayer plugins), it is reasonable to build a solution around that software. We will not make anything like that (even Flash based) in the next 6 or 12 months and until that time free software may be much more stable.
BTW, VLC is a really good piece of software (including their streaming software VLS). Did anyone think to make contact with them? I am sure that it would be possible to work on "the solution for Wikipedia" with them.
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