We have done a good amount of work with
archive.org to ensure that their
archive is interpretable. I know from the present vantage point it does
not seem helpful to have media on
archive.org... but as features like
the add_media_wizard get deployed it will make a lot more sense why it
does not matter so much where the source media is hosted.
In terms of source files... I think the problem is people don't
necessarily have the bandwidth to upload their raw DV footage... If
they do then we should also upload a copy to
archive.org. Using firefogg
its easy to add a js function call to also send a copy of the raw
non-ogg encoded footage to
archive.org all from within our commons
upload interface.
Its of course always better to have the original. But I would argue (for
the time being) we should store that original on
archive.org rather than
build out and maintain all the trannscoder & raw footage storage
infrastructure internally. In the future if we do have time and or
resources (volunteer or otherwise) to support transocding on wikimedia
commons... then thats great and we can support that too.
In terms of encoder updates: Firefogg lets us control the encoder via
Firefox extension auto updates. Firefogg is already running the
thusnelda encoder branch. In the future we can push out other free
encoders (dirac speex etc). This makes it much easier for someone to
build a collaborative video wiki since they don't need to build out
transcoding infrastructure.
--michael
Tim Starling wrote:
Peter Gervai wrote:
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 17:26, David
Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It would be a simple matter of programming to
have something that
allows upload of encumbered video and audio formats and re-encode them
as Ogg Theora or Ogg Vorbis.
As a technical sidenote, it should be mentioned that recoding a lossy
format to another lossy format results _always_ a worse quality output
than the source lossy format. The amount of quality loss depends on
countless factors and usually do not render the result useless, but
the quality difference may be still audible/visible.
But if we can do resizing and quality conversion post-upload, then we
can encourage users to upload their videos with the best possible
quality, they won't be forced to upload at a quality suitable for web
download. We can store the source video unconverted for archival
purposes. When we reduce the quality of a video for a web user, the
process will be under server control and can be incrementally
improved, instead of using whatever outdated software the user has on
their computer. So the net effect of the feature should be a
significant improvement in video quality.
-- Tim Starling
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