Hi,
At first thanks for your work, but please don't forget, that we produce free
content embedded in (patent) free standards using free software.
The Internet Archive currently does not transcode to
Ogg Theora, but
has a transcoding pipeline in place for other codecs. They have
recently started embedding the Flash-based open source "Flow Player"
for playing back FLV files directly in the browser, and have added FLV
to their transcoding pipeline.
And these other codecs are what? They are proprietary. Even if Gnash and
friends are covering 100% of Flash you can't use 100% Flash cause of the
proprietary file formats. I simply do not want us to degrade
Ogg-Vorbis/Theora, just because other people aren't willing use Free
Software.
It really goes on my nerves that I have to install for example mpeglib,
libdvdcss and friends additionally by hand just because of stupid software
patents and DCMA, while Ogg works out of the box.
Ogg is the only media format that allows for perfect usability out of the box.
The Archive is happy to support us with video hosting
in any way. If
we can find a useful hosting arrangement with them, they would also be
willing to add Ogg Theora to their transcoding pipeline.
These are nice news but I simply don't want us to open the can of worms with
mp3, mpgeg, wmf and whatnot.
This will exactly happen if you do that (Fair Use was already a big failure
and the fact that you don't regard allowing Fair Use in en.wikipedia and
en.wikinews as a big failure in principle, is probably the reason for
thinking that flash video is acceptable).
So yes I think this would be very very much welcome if they provide content in
Ogg-Vorbis/Theora. Either they are our proud free content and free technology
provider or not.
Cheers, Arnomane