(I'm not sure offhand if I'm set up to cross-post to Foundation-l; if this doesn't make it, somebody please CC a mention if necessary. Thanks!)
On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 4:42 PM, aude aude.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
Aside from the very real privacy issue, YouTube videos can disappear at any time. I would much rather we host them on Commons.
A youtube2commons script is pretty easy to implement, but the big hindrance is the 100 MB upload limit on Commons. What are the plans (if any) to increase this? or help facilitate us (e.g. via the api, from the toolserver, ...) in uploading video and files that exceed the limit?
There's been some ongoing work on TimedMediaHandler extension which will replace the older OggHandler (this provides the nicer video player we've got hacked in on Commons, and some automatic transcoding for different resolutions in the free Theora & WebM formats). This still needs a little more work, and probably some improvements on the actual transcoding management and such, but this will help a bit in supporting larger files (eg by transcoding high-res files to lower-res they're more easily viewable). This isn't ready to go just yet though, and there's still the issue of actually uploading the files.
Basic uploads by URL work in theory, but I'm not sure the deployment status. Background large-file downloads are currently disabled in the latest code and needs to be reimplemented if that's to be used.
For straight uploads, regular uploads of large files are a bit problematic in general (they hit memory limits and such and have to make it through caching proxies and whatnot), but there's also been some new work on improved chunked uploads for FireFogg (and perhaps for general modern browsers that can do fancier uploads). Michael Dale can probably give some updates on this, but it'll be a bit yet before it's ready to go.
-- brion