On Tue, Jan 23, 2024 at 11:44 AM Brion Vibber bvibber@wikimedia.org wrote:
- Overturn the requirement to avoid handling h.264 files on Wikimedia servers or
accept them from users or serve them to users. Allow importing h.264 uploads and creating h.264 transcodes for playback compatibility.
The last RFC [1] will reach its 10 year anniversary in February, so I think it would be reasonable to re-engage with the (Wikimedia-wide) community if anything about the current policy should change. Personally, I continue to be in favor of Wikimedia transcoding uploads, as long as WMF doesn't end up paying licensing fees to the video patent monopolists.
What's changed over the last 10 years? Looking at Commons:Video, it currently says:
The preferred video format is VP9 video in the WebM container, but Theora video in the ogv container and VP8 or AV1 video in the WebM container are also allowed.
So at least it looks like there are now new royalty-free formats that are widely supported in browsers, right?
Is there anything that can be done to expand the server-side format support further without changing Wikimedia's stance on patents? For example, should Wikimedia Commons support additional container formats or codecs that are royalty-free or whose patents have expired?
Warmly, Erik
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video