I mentioned earlier that I wanted to discuss open standards and file formats in advance of the next board meeting. I'd especially like to look at how these issues relate to our mission. There are a variety of questions involved, which I'll summarize in terms of freedom - the freedom that providing access to knowledge can give the recipient, and the freedom that avoiding intellectual property restrictions can give our culture generally. I trust we'd all agree both of these are positive things in line with the Wikimedia Foundation's mission, which is what makes it difficult if we have to choose between them.
The more we move beyond simple text, the more intellectual property restrictions expand beyond simple copyright to increasing complexity (multiple rightsholders, patents, DRM, trademarks, database rights). Sometimes these things can be fairly benign, to the extent of being at least gratis-free, especially at the "consumer" level. Perhaps in terms of our effort to provide access to knowledge, they might not impose any real restrictions, except in extreme edge cases. But so far, we have a pretty strong commitment to absolute freedom, even with respect to areas that don't directly impact our work.
To illustrate this with an example, maybe not the best but one that comes up often enough, consider video file formats. (Some of this is beyond my technical expertise, so please forgive any misstatements.) Adobe Flash has widespread adoption to the point of being near-universal. The company has also been moving to make it more open for people watching, distributing, and working on content in this environment. It's close to free, but I understand there are still some issues like patent "encumbrances" around Flash. Meanwhile, there are pure free software formats that do similar things but have pretty limited adoption.
This brings up a number of questions. First of all, how important is multimedia content to us in general? Considering both the investment to create it and the environment in which it's produced, historically it's a lot less amenable to free licensing. It's still useful, no doubt, but what measures should we take to promote it?
Back to the two manifestations of freedom I mentioned, how should we balance those? One possibility that's been raised is to allow Flash content so long as we require that it be encoded and distributed in a truly free format as well. Is that sort of approach an acceptable compromise? It would make it much easier to achieve wide distribution of free content, while still making sure that it's also available completely without restrictions, for those who find that important. Are there situations in which this compromise doesn't work out for some reason? Why? (And none of this has to be limited to the Flash video example, discussion of other formats and standards is welcome.)
In dealing with the limited adoption of certain free formats, some people have advocated a more evangelistic approach, if you will. Given the reach of Wikipedia in particular, it's suggested that our policy could push wider adoption of these formats. That may be, but the question is, how much is that push worth? What are the prospects for making those formats readable in the average reader's environment, and encouraging wider use as a standard? Does an uncompromising approach result in significant progress, or would we simply be marginalizing the impact of our work? And is it worth the "sacrifice" of the many people who would miss out on some of the knowledge we're sharing, because the free format isn't accessible to them? (That's also partly a problem of disseminating knowledge, of course.) If we adopt a compromise position as described earlier, how much do we lose in terms of promoting the freer formats?
Before I joined the board, I understand the board considered a resolution to create a file format policy. These are the kinds of questions we need to consider before we can set such a policy. We're not going to be passing anything at next week's meeting, though, the discussion isn't far enough along and it wouldn't be right to push it through with so little consultation. But we need to have the conversation, so I would like the community's feedback on this list, both now and feel free to continue during and after our meeting.
--Michael Snow
I think the first question we need to answer is what purpose would Flash serve in our projects? Flash is good for making games you can play in your browser where you throw little stick men around when they try and attack your castle, I've yet to see another good use for it. There are free formats for video that are far better than Flash, Flash's only advantage is interactivity but I can't see any reason we would need that in our projects (beyond simple interactivity which can be achieved in other ways - HTML can do most of what we might need).
On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net wrote:
I mentioned earlier that I wanted to discuss open standards and file formats in advance of the next board meeting. I'd especially like to
[snip]
near-universal. The company has also been moving to make it more open for people watching, distributing, and working on content in this environment.
[snip]
There are so many distinct classes of problem with flash that it can be hard to have a productive discussion about it. For example, you can assault flash for being ruinous for accessibility to the disabled, you can criticize the problems of security created if you allow uploading flash software, flash lacking freely licensed authoring tools, for it being browser crashing, being mostly used for toys and trash, so widely blocked in many business environments, etc.
For the purpose of this discussion I'm going to talk about flash-as-a-video-format. For that purpose the important problems are almost entirely caused by the codecs used inside flash. Adobe does not own the patents those formats and couldn't freely license if they wanted to. Not only has this situation not gotten better recently, but it has gotten worse as Adobe has incorporated a newer highly non-free video format.
It's close to free, but I understand there are still some
I nominate this for the most misguided statement of the year award. :)
Flash video requires the some of the most encumbered and expensive video formats available. The rights holders of H.264 have created a "your first hit is free" short time offer where web use is possible at no-cost until 2010. While I do not know what it will cost post-2010 H.264, today the licensing for non-web use of H.264 involves per-use/per-device licensing fees which are the most expensive of any widely used codec that I am aware of.
Microsoft's OOXML office format is closer to a free format than the video used in flash. :)
It's important to get details like this correct in a public message since mistaken statements like this harm the hard work done by many people working to improve the situation.
It would make it much easier to achieve wide distribution of free content, while still making sure that it's also available
This is a discussion that no one can rationally have without an objective look of what the benefits would actually be. It needs to be backed up with measurements.
But no where in your message do I see you raise a serious question of what advantage would be gained in return. It seems to be just accepted that there would be some great benefit ("It would make it much easier to achieve wide distribution"), with only an airy an unquantifiable "evangelism" lost as though there were no pragmatic benefit.
The existing system correctly plays back for an overwhelming majority of users (I posted some stats on this two years ago or so), though my ability to measure the success rate was lost when it was made a part of the site-proper. The 'much easier' assertion is often made, but not backed up with facts. While I think we can agree that there would be some benefit to using Flash Video, the evidence I've seen so far would indicate that the benefit would not be that great.
The primary usability problems on our site have been pointed out to be things mostly or totally unrelated to format choice. For example, we have no software facility for converting arbitrary uploads from users to whatever we'd like to distribute. This is a format-agnostic problem and it results directly from Wikimedia's historic non-investment in this area of functionality. The same inability to transcode on the fly means that if a user uploads a 10mbit/sec video,your DSL connected PC will sputter as we attempted to cram 10mbit/s into a 1mbit/sec pipe.
The typical bitrate used by youtube has historically been around 250kbit/sec for audio + video, which is why the quality is poor, but which is also a major reason why it works fairly well. When last I checked the average bitrate of videos on commons was about 4mbit/sec.
So you're making a significant error if you compare the results obtained by a company whos bread and butter is working video with the results we've obtained while targeting a very different use case, and with video largely as an after-thought.
So I think the benefits question is still far from closed.
Are there situations in which this compromise doesn't work out for some reason? Why? (And none of this has to be limited to the Flash video example, discussion of other formats and standards is welcome.)
In dealing with the limited adoption of certain free formats, some people have advocated a more evangelistic approach, if you will.
There is a real practical loss associated with offering formats that require payment for their use even in parallel to free formats, one which extends beyond the licensing costs that Wikimedia itself will likely have to pay.
Consider: the only reason we (or almost anyone else) would ever consider using a slightly non-free format is because there is some 'costly' shortcoming in the free-format. For free audio and video formats the shortcoming is that they are not widely adopted. For media types where a free format is widely adopted: hypertext (HTML), uncompressed audio (wav), still photographs (jpg), absolutely no one suggests that we even consider using non-free formats, although proprietary formats do exist in these areas.
Right now there does not really exist a free format for low bandwidth video: There is Flash/H.264 which requires payment to the rights holders. Alternatively there is Ogg/Theora which you pay for in reduced compatibility.
The difference is that if we offer only the latter we will cause (and demonstrably have caused) people to install the latter and encourage vendors to support the latter which decreases that cost for everyone, eventually contributing to the format becoming truely without cost.
I don't see value in evangelism for formats, and I don't expect you to. I see value in creating a world where success in our mission, which ought to include people being able to exchange the knowledge we have recorded without paying format taxes, is possible without compromises. Getting there requires something that looks a little like evangelism, but the motivation is entirely different.
Offering "Widely-adopted-non-free-format *and* not-widely-adopted-free-format" is a minor compromise for someone who's motivation is promoting "not-widely-adopted free-format". But if the motivation is "make the free format widely adopted, so no one is forced by the market to use the non-free format" then it doesn't make much sense as a compromise because it completely loses the ability to use Wikimedia as an argument for including free formats in browsers, and completely loses the encouragement for regular users to click-install and get support themselves.
But until the free formats have enough adoption that people feel no reason to consider this using non-free for reasons of adoption, there really is no such thing as a free format, only formats with different kinds of costs, and Wikimedia needs to help change that if it wants it's work to live up to the licenses the work is distributed under.
Once adoption is no longer a factor in the use of non-free formats, I'll gladly write the flash-video support for Wikimedia myself if Wikimedia still wants it. ... but it won't want it, because it will no longer be a consideration just like non-free text formats are not a consideration. The fact that it is a consideration is all the evidence you should need to see that format-freeness is still a problem which is obstructing Wikimedia's mission.
If you want to fix this problem you could start by investing in the solution: There are organizations like Xiph and events like FOMS (http://www.foms-workshop.org/foms2009/) which would benefit greatly from Wikimedia's support. Every Wikimania seems to have attendance by people in the proprietary video world, but folks working on free tools seem to get little audience because they can't afford the travel, and can't sponsor PR blitzes.
2008/9/27 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
The existing system correctly plays back for an overwhelming majority of users (I posted some stats on this two years ago or so)
Could you give a link, just for reference purposes?
I think this discussion needs to be informed by as much hard data as possible: Do users manage to successfully and repeatedly play back a full video with sound, and how does their success rate compare with other solutions? How do they behave when they cannot play the video? I'll look into what we can do to get up-to-date user experiences. Things should improve significantly with Firefox 3.1, so we may want to hold off any new tests until it has gained some adoption.
I don't think there's any question that we are committed to making sure that every piece of user-facing content, including interactivity, can be accessed using 100% open source software. That's an important consensus. The primary issue is the question of parallel distribution, which is one on which reasonable people can disagree. We should collect as much data as possible to help the Board reach a decision on that question.
BTW: I do think the question about supporting OOXML is a relevant and reasonable one. PediaPress has developed an open source wiki-to-ODT converter as part of their wiki-to-print technology, and I think one can reasonably ask whether we want to support OOXML in the future as an output format. An example use scenario would be a teacher downloading a collection of Wikipedia articles to edit in Microsoft Word. Again, it raises the same issue of competing interests (primarily a belief in short term impact vs. one in long term transformative changes).
On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 3:52 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2008/9/27 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
The existing system correctly plays back for an overwhelming majority of users (I posted some stats on this two years ago or so)
Could you give a link, just for reference purposes?
I think this discussion needs to be informed by as much hard data as possible: Do users manage to successfully and repeatedly play back a full video with sound, and how does their success rate compare with other solutions? How do they behave when they cannot play the video? I'll look into what we can do to get up-to-date user experiences. Things should improve significantly with Firefox 3.1, so we may want to hold off any new tests until it has gained some adoption.
i was wondering how one could check that, and i noticed that i did not know, out of the top of my head, a single article including a video. so i checked commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Video.
and, surprise, no sound on ubuntu intrepid (mine at least). e.g. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:AK_drum_performance.ogg. the ogg itself plays with sound, there is just no easy possibility in wikipedia to play it that way as the java player insists to come up, and does not work as expected. also, i had to look for a video with sound, because the videos are not marked if they are with or without sound.
maybe we should start an initiative to include all these videos to some articles to get more feedback? or add an easy "feedback" link prominently going to some kind of otrs?
rupert.
THURNER rupert wrote:
i was wondering how one could check that, and i noticed that i did not know, out of the top of my head, a single article including a video. so i checked commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Video.
and, surprise, no sound on ubuntu intrepid (mine at least). e.g. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:AK_drum_performance.ogg. the ogg itself plays with sound, there is just no easy possibility in wikipedia to play it that way as the java player insists to come up, and does not work as expected.
After you click the play button, click the "more" link below the player. A box will pop up giving you other player option and a link to download the file. Fixing Java is probably your own responsibility if you want to run a beta distro. It works just fine for me on hardy. But feel free to file a bug report.
also, i had to look for a video with sound, because the videos are not marked if they are with or without sound.
On the description page, there is a type description which tells you whether the file has sound or not. For example, with sound:
(Ogg multiplexed audio/video file, Theora/Vorbis, length 6.0s, 320×240 pixels, 2.1Mbps overall)
Without sound:
(Ogg Theora video file, length 3m54s, 160×120 pixels, 178kbps)
Unfortunately many silent videos have an empty Vorbis soundtrack, unnecessarily bloating the size of the file. I'm not aware of any user-friendly tool for fixing this, maybe Greg knows one.
maybe we should start an initiative to include all these videos to some articles to get more feedback? or add an easy "feedback" link prominently going to some kind of otrs?
Please do not submit bug reports or feature requests to OTRS. Use https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/
-- Tim Starling
2008/9/30 Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org:
Unfortunately many silent videos have an empty Vorbis soundtrack, unnecessarily bloating the size of the file. I'm not aware of any user-friendly tool for fixing this, maybe Greg knows one.
ffmpeg2theora can do it in theory but it kept crashing last time I tried (compression ajustment however works to an extent).
Erik Moeller wrote:
I don't think there's any question that we are committed to making sure that every piece of user-facing content, including interactivity, can be accessed using 100% open source software. That's an important consensus. The primary issue is the question of parallel distribution, which is one on which reasonable people can disagree. We should collect as much data as possible to help the Board reach a decision on that question.
Simply because your first statement is in fact totally inaccurate, it is clearly a very useful clarification, coming as it does, from someone in your position.
:-)
Nevertheless, the statement is not in any shape or form relevant to the discussion about document formats. (For those joining the discussion late, software and document formats are quite separate things, only very tangentially and rarely significantly meeting - I think the brouhaha about Lempel-Ziv buried that question for a while)
I don't think suggesting that nailing down that we are committed to software being 100% open source, but "flexible" on formats, is a useful contribution to the discussion on that front, but more akin to a red herring. I think I have said this before. And I think I will continue to repeat this whenever given the chance, "ceterum censeo".
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 9:15 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
I don't think there's any question that we are committed to making sure that every piece of user-facing content, including interactivity, can be accessed using 100% open source software. That's an important consensus. The primary issue is the question of parallel distribution, which is one on which reasonable people can disagree. We should collect as much data as possible to help the Board reach a decision on that question.
Simply because your first statement is in fact totally inaccurate, it is clearly a very useful clarification, coming as it does, from someone in your position.
:-)
Nevertheless, the statement is not in any shape or form relevant to the discussion about document formats. (For those joining the discussion late, software and document formats are quite separate things, only very tangentially and rarely significantly meeting - ...
Mixing the two compounds the confusion.
I think the brouhaha about Lempel-Ziv buried that question for a while)
I'll bite...
Lempel-Ziv brouhaha ?
I don't think suggesting that nailing down that we are committed to software being 100% open source, but "flexible" on formats, is a useful contribution to the discussion on that front, but more akin to a red herring. I think I have said this before. And I think I will continue to repeat this whenever given the chance, "ceterum censeo".
When each is discussed separately, it becomes harder to justify a soft approach.
Do we want WMF to only use open source software?
Do we want WMF to only support unencumbered formats?
Many would answer "Yes" to both questions.
If a hardware provider wants Wikimedia content transcoded into a different format for use on their new wizbang device, they should develop their own technology to achieve this, or pay WMF bucketloads of money to help them.
-- John Vandenberg
John Vandenberg wrote:
On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 9:15 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
I don't think there's any question that we are committed to making sure that every piece of user-facing content, including interactivity, can be accessed using 100% open source software. That's an important consensus. The primary issue is the question of parallel distribution, which is one on which reasonable people can disagree. We should collect as much data as possible to help the Board reach a decision on that question.
Simply because your first statement is in fact totally inaccurate, it is clearly a very useful clarification, coming as it does, from someone in your position.
:-)
Nevertheless, the statement is not in any shape or form relevant to the discussion about document formats. (For those joining the discussion late, software and document formats are quite separate things, only very tangentially and rarely significantly meeting - ...
Mixing the two compounds the confusion.
I think the brouhaha about Lempel-Ziv buried that question for a while)
I'll bite...
Lempel-Ziv brouhaha ?
I am aware that I am dating myself there.
As I recall it, (and my recollection is as ever fallible) there was a claim by some that a compression format was protected. And it was upheld. But the mathematical algorithm wasn't protected, so a totally equivalent format was created (and if I recall improved upon) later, and the original claimants for protection got their butts spanked, even though their claim held.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 9:52 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2008/9/27 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
The existing system correctly plays back for an overwhelming majority of users (I posted some stats on this two years ago or so)
Could you give a link, just for reference purposes?
Ugh archive searching.
Here is one: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-March/028210.html
"The last weeks data of 143,530 unique IPs shows that 79% of the IPs hitting the Java audio player on toolserver have a Java Virtual Machine. However, of those only 78% (61% of the total) have a JRE new enough to use Jorbis. I believe Cortando has a resampler in it to permit it work on the old MSFT JVMs, so it should do better. The number is skewed a bit by the fact that people without java are unlikely to vist again soon since it didn't work, and are somewhat better than my initial numbers, but I've also improved compatibility dramatically since then."
(In the months that post the player was changed to something with dramatically more JVM compatibility.)
We should basically expect the current success rate to be the total number of people with a working Java install, which should include all recent Macs, plus perhaps a percent with support from other supported modes (Firefox 3.1alpha, Opera alpha, VLC, QT+XiphQT, totem plugin). If it's not that high then there is something that we've done wrong.
Once Firefox 3.1 is released we should expect a non-trivial boost: Firefox users upgraded to 2.0 very quickly, and firefox is a larger share of Wikimedia's traffic than most of the published broswer penetration numbers.
[snip]
Things should improve significantly with Firefox 3.1, so we may want to hold off any new tests until it has gained some adoption.
It's always worthwhile to test, you can just discard the results if they are not yet useful. If nothing else some recent information might help eliminate some Wikimedia induced lowness... It's only fair to do measurements which reflect a little bit of "trying to make it successful".
On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 6:42 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Once adoption is no longer a factor in the use of non-free formats, I'll gladly write the flash-video support for Wikimedia myself if Wikimedia still wants it. ... but it won't want it, because it will no longer be a consideration just like non-free text formats are not a consideration. The fact that it is a consideration is all the evidence you should need to see that format-freeness is still a problem which is obstructing Wikimedia's mission.
I agree with this completely. If there were any reason to support both encumbered and unencumbered image formats -- say, better accessibility for a minority of users who thanks to historical accident didn't have access to a way to display unencumbered formats -- we could write an automatic converter.
Or if there were a specialty format that worked for ultra-low-bandwidth circumstances and no free equivalent, again providing an automatic converter into that format would make sense.
If you want to fix this problem you could start by investing in the solution: There are organizations like Xiph and events like FOMS (http://www.foms-workshop.org/foms2009/) which would benefit greatly from Wikimedia's support. Every Wikimania seems to have attendance by people in the proprietary video world, but folks working on free tools seem to get little audience because they can't afford the travel, and can't sponsor PR blitzes.
Indeed. The OLPC laptops ship with only .ogg and gnash support, which has led some leading video sites such as Dailymotion to spend more effort on providing ogg display and upload support, but there is almost no PR uptake on these stories...
Press such as this isn't very widely read outside a small community... http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/64039.html
I remember a brief thread involving Monty two years ago about making a more widespread commons/xiph promotion, but don't recall any result. Has anyone had luck finding someone there who can get behind related publicity?
SJ
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Gregory Maxwell wrote:
There are so many distinct classes of problem with flash that it can be hard to have a productive discussion about it.
[snip]
For the purpose of this discussion I'm going to talk about flash-as-a-video-format. For that purpose the important problems are almost entirely caused by the codecs used inside flash.
[snip]
Just a quick note -- there actually *are* potential productive uses of Flash outside of the video player context. Like so many things, Flash is best used when it's invisible. :)
The primary other areas where I might consider Flash are:
1) An aid in an improved file upload system.
Flash's file upload capability is slightly more flexible than the general HTML+HTTP one natively supported by browsers, providing better support for multiple file uploads and progress feedback.
WordPress, like MediaWiki an open-source LAMP application, has a nice example of a progressive enhancement in their upload widget, using the Flash upload interface when available.
2) Fallback implementation of open web standards for Internet Explorer.
Other popular web browsers (the so-called "web standards" world) are actively supporting open client-side goodies such as SVG graphics and the <canvas> element, which can be used to create <buzzword>rich interactive experiences</buzzword>.
Maps, timelines, equation graphs, gravity simulators, all sorts of fun and educational things can be created which would benefit from just a _leetle_ fancier systems than raw HTML 4 + JavaScript.
That's something we don't currently do, but is something we'll want to consider for the future; we're about creating free, open, *educational resources*, and visual interactive activities can be part of that goal.
[Of course we don't want to neglect print and non-visual and non-interactive models as well! But remember, accessibility doesn't mean limiting yourself to the lowest common denominator.]
There are open-source Flash implementations of <canvas> which can provide a unified interface that works on modern web-standards browsers and on IE with Flash.
Alternatively, a Java version is probably possible too. :)
How best to implement creating interactive thingies in a community-edited browser environment (safely!) is an open problem, but it's one that might well benefit from properly-considered use of Flash (and without any video/audio codec patent issues).
Other tools, such as page activity history graphs which could be zoomed inline, could also benefit from this sort of system without having to worry about sandboxing. Like so many things, these would benefit from progressive enhancement: always support a solid PNG, use dynamic <canvas> graphic if available, etc.
This stuff wouldn't depend on patented codecs.
- -- brion
Brion Vibber wrote:
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Gregory Maxwell wrote:
There are so many distinct classes of problem with flash that it can be hard to have a productive discussion about it.
[snip]
For the purpose of this discussion I'm going to talk about flash-as-a-video-format. For that purpose the important problems are almost entirely caused by the codecs used inside flash.
[snip]
Just a quick note -- there actually *are* potential productive uses of Flash outside of the video player context. Like so many things, Flash is best used when it's invisible. :)
The primary other areas where I might consider Flash are:
- An aid in an improved file upload system.
Flash's file upload capability is slightly more flexible than the general HTML+HTTP one natively supported by browsers, providing better support for multiple file uploads and progress feedback.
WordPress, like MediaWiki an open-source LAMP application, has a nice example of a progressive enhancement in their upload widget, using the Flash upload interface when available.
- Fallback implementation of open web standards for Internet Explorer.
Other popular web browsers (the so-called "web standards" world) are actively supporting open client-side goodies such as SVG graphics and the <canvas> element, which can be used to create <buzzword>rich interactive experiences</buzzword>.
Maps, timelines, equation graphs, gravity simulators, all sorts of fun and educational things can be created which would benefit from just a _leetle_ fancier systems than raw HTML 4 + JavaScript.
That's something we don't currently do, but is something we'll want to consider for the future; we're about creating free, open, *educational resources*, and visual interactive activities can be part of that goal.
[Of course we don't want to neglect print and non-visual and non-interactive models as well! But remember, accessibility doesn't mean limiting yourself to the lowest common denominator.]
There are open-source Flash implementations of <canvas> which can provide a unified interface that works on modern web-standards browsers and on IE with Flash.
Alternatively, a Java version is probably possible too. :)
How best to implement creating interactive thingies in a community-edited browser environment (safely!) is an open problem, but it's one that might well benefit from properly-considered use of Flash (and without any video/audio codec patent issues).
Other tools, such as page activity history graphs which could be zoomed inline, could also benefit from this sort of system without having to worry about sandboxing. Like so many things, these would benefit from progressive enhancement: always support a solid PNG, use dynamic <canvas> graphic if available, etc.
This stuff wouldn't depend on patented codecs.
- -- brion
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In complete contra-distinction to Eriks post, this on the face of it appears to be a useful contribution to the discussion about file formats.
For both my own benefit and the benefit of others who may be equally at sea with regard to the fine points of this subject, let me attempt to paraphrase what you have said above in a way that makes more simple sense to me. I hope you will correct any errors of understanding I have, because that is why I am doing the following:
If I understand correctly, you are saying that flash can benefit us not as something in which our content in the sense of the "original" document is kept, but as a form of conveying that "original" document to a prospective single time user. That is not conveyed to somebody who wants our content for mass reuse, but who wants just that one snippet of content, that one time.
Or even conveying our massive lumps of content for reuse, but only during transit, not changing the format in which it is stored at our end, nor at their final product stage.
The second part of your message, do I understand it correctly that you are suggesting that content we would already have in some form, could be conveyed to people who can not digest it in the format in which it is stored, by some <magic> fashion can be made available to them, by the expedience of using flash, when nothing else would serve?
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
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Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
In complete contra-distinction to Eriks post, this on the face of it appears to be a useful contribution to the discussion about file formats.
:)
If I understand correctly, you are saying that flash can benefit us not as something in which our content in the sense of the "original" document is kept, but as a form of conveying that "original" document to a prospective single time user. That is not conveyed to somebody who wants our content for mass reuse, but who wants just that one snippet of content, that one time.
Well, here's how I might summarize the issue: Flash is a _software platform_, not a _content format_.
Now, we don't tend to like big flashy take-over-the-whole-site Flash thingies. Who does? When Flash replaces a whole web page it tends to make things harder to use.
But for specific things that classic HTML is limited at (like, say, interactive vector graphics), it could be a useful *delivery tool* in our toolbox *alongside* the lovely HTML 5/W3C/"open web standards" tools we love, when they're not available.
Flash-as-a-video-player only supports patent-encumbered audio and video codecs. The issue there isn't really Flash, but the underlying media formats the Adobe Flash Player supports.
Flash-as-a-lightweight-client-platform has different characteristics:
* The de facto standard implementation has something like 90% market penetration, and is not open source.
(Same with Internet Explorer, which we support as a target for our HTML+JS+CSS output.)
* Open source implementations exist, but they are incomplete and rarely seen in the wild.
(Unlike plain HTML, it's not a de jure standard *or* a de facto standard in the world of FOSS operating systems. Thus it shouldn't be our sole or primary target since we care very much about supporting users in that world.)
* The file formats Flash uses to load its software are not open standards, but they _are_ now documented without NDA restrictions. Further, core development tools for the platform such as bytecode compilers are open source.
(MediaWiki's own wiki text format is also not an open standard, but what documentation exists is open, the tool is open source, and we deliver to open standards.)
The second part of your message, do I understand it correctly that you are suggesting that content we would already have in some form, could be conveyed to people who can not digest it in the format in which it is stored, by some <magic> fashion can be made available to them, by the expedience of using flash, when nothing else would serve?
*nod*
The example I used is the <canvas> element for scriptable in-browser graphics. This has become a part of next-generation HTML standards work thanks to de-facto adoption by the various major web browsers... except for Internet Explorer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_(HTML_element)
So this is a neat tool for more interactive web goodies which is part of the open standards movement; you can make something using <canvas> which will work on Firefox, Safari, and Opera. But today, you need something _else_ for Internet Explorer.
One way to do this is to make an emulation layer which provides the standard <canvas> programming interface. One such project uses Flash as a base, since it provides similar graphics capabilities and lets you provide a JavaScript interface:
http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/flash-canvas/
There are also VML-based implementations for IE which don't require Flash. AFAIK they're all limited, and we don't do any <canvas> stuff today anyway. :) But it's something I wouldn't want to rule out at this stage.
Progressive enhancement for uploading tools is more likely to happen in the short to medium term.
(As an amusing side, note, somebody's been working on an Ogg Vorbis decoder for Flash, which compiles to ActionScript: http://barelyfocused.net/blog/2008/10/03/flash-vorbis-player/ No Theora video support yet. ;)
- -- brion
Brion, you are talking as a chief of technical staff of one small NGO. Please, keep in mind that you are the main technical person of the biggest achievement of humans. While it is inside of the reasonable solutions, Wiki[mp]edia doesn't need to adopt anything which is ethically not acceptable.
* Showing movies may be solved by VLC or whichever free software plugin. * It seems that SVG is better format than SWF. However, it is not supported yet.
But, "interactive content" written in Flash is useful for video games and a very small specter of other content. Interactive content will be really useful when SVG would be adopted.
Also, I may see that Erik Zachte made good dynamic statistics without using Flash (and without SVG, as far as I understand).
On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
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Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
In complete contra-distinction to Eriks post, this on the face of it appears to be a useful contribution to the discussion about file formats.
:)
If I understand correctly, you are saying that flash can benefit us not as something in which our content in the sense of the "original" document is kept, but as a form of conveying that "original" document to a prospective single time user. That is not conveyed to somebody who wants our content for mass reuse, but who wants just that one snippet of content, that one time.
Well, here's how I might summarize the issue: Flash is a _software platform_, not a _content format_.
Now, we don't tend to like big flashy take-over-the-whole-site Flash thingies. Who does? When Flash replaces a whole web page it tends to make things harder to use.
But for specific things that classic HTML is limited at (like, say, interactive vector graphics), it could be a useful *delivery tool* in our toolbox *alongside* the lovely HTML 5/W3C/"open web standards" tools we love, when they're not available.
Flash-as-a-video-player only supports patent-encumbered audio and video codecs. The issue there isn't really Flash, but the underlying media formats the Adobe Flash Player supports.
Flash-as-a-lightweight-client-platform has different characteristics:
- The de facto standard implementation has something like 90% market
penetration, and is not open source.
(Same with Internet Explorer, which we support as a target for our HTML+JS+CSS output.)
- Open source implementations exist, but they are incomplete and rarely
seen in the wild.
(Unlike plain HTML, it's not a de jure standard *or* a de facto standard in the world of FOSS operating systems. Thus it shouldn't be our sole or primary target since we care very much about supporting users in that world.)
- The file formats Flash uses to load its software are not open
standards, but they _are_ now documented without NDA restrictions. Further, core development tools for the platform such as bytecode compilers are open source.
(MediaWiki's own wiki text format is also not an open standard, but what documentation exists is open, the tool is open source, and we deliver to open standards.)
The second part of your message, do I understand it correctly that you are suggesting that content we would already have in some form, could be conveyed to people who can not digest it in the format in which it is stored, by some <magic> fashion can be made available to them, by the expedience of using flash, when nothing else would serve?
*nod*
The example I used is the <canvas> element for scriptable in-browser graphics. This has become a part of next-generation HTML standards work thanks to de-facto adoption by the various major web browsers... except for Internet Explorer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_(HTML_element)
So this is a neat tool for more interactive web goodies which is part of the open standards movement; you can make something using <canvas> which will work on Firefox, Safari, and Opera. But today, you need something _else_ for Internet Explorer.
One way to do this is to make an emulation layer which provides the standard <canvas> programming interface. One such project uses Flash as a base, since it provides similar graphics capabilities and lets you provide a JavaScript interface:
http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/flash-canvas/
There are also VML-based implementations for IE which don't require Flash. AFAIK they're all limited, and we don't do any <canvas> stuff today anyway. :) But it's something I wouldn't want to rule out at this stage.
Progressive enhancement for uploading tools is more likely to happen in the short to medium term.
(As an amusing side, note, somebody's been working on an Ogg Vorbis decoder for Flash, which compiles to ActionScript: http://barelyfocused.net/blog/2008/10/03/flash-vorbis-player/ No Theora video support yet. ;)
- -- brion
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2008/10/3 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
Also, I may see that Erik Zachte made good dynamic statistics without using Flash (and without SVG, as far as I understand).
The <canvas> element of HTML5, in Firefox. That's what all the cool browsers are doing these days.
- d.
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David Gerard wrote:
2008/10/3 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
Also, I may see that Erik Zachte made good dynamic statistics without using Flash (and without SVG, as far as I understand).
The <canvas> element of HTML5, in Firefox. That's what all the cool browsers are doing these days.
Which was my example of a preferred target technology. :)
- -- brion
On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 5:19 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
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David Gerard wrote:
2008/10/3 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
Also, I may see that Erik Zachte made good dynamic statistics without using Flash (and without SVG, as far as I understand).
The <canvas> element of HTML5, in Firefox. That's what all the cool browsers are doing these days.
Which was my example of a preferred target technology. :)
Right. I wouldn't be opposed to using flash to run a drop-in <canvas> emulator (providing the emulator flash file itself was free software) for features where the rest of the code is regular old JS which ran without flash on modern browsers.
The important distinction currently between a flash video player and a <canvas> emulator is that the canvas emulator would be an option open to everyone at no cost while a flash video player currently requires codecs that require licensing due to patents. (For the codecs fees must be paid for encoders, decoders, and for usage of the encoded files).
So even if the use of the canvas emulator misses an opportunity to encourage people to install a <canvas> supporting browser that does not costs anyone their freedom or leaving anyone feeling forced to spend money. Any website could throw up the same JS code that uses the native HTML or free softwareFlash Canvas and pay fees to no one and be at no risk of litigation.
Those sorts of usage usually don't create any additional accessibility problems, nor create any materil security problems.
So yea, I agree that there could be possibly reasonable uses of Flash, which was exactly why I singled out flash video in my initial post in this thread. Such uses, which run afoul of no patents nor involve any proprietary-only features wouldn't be prohibited by the proposed file format resolution (as members of the subset of flash files which are not proprietary nor require unavailable codec patents). Sadly, Video is not currently one of them but it's the use of Flash everyone but Brion thinks of. ;)
Though I do wonder how many of the other uses would ever happen and how many are just idle speculation: For example we've had a Java bulk uploader (commonist) for *years* which could be web-started with nearly zero effort (throw the jar onto upload, and the rest could be done from sitejs) and make bulk uploading much easier. ... Yet, it hasn't been done.
Hoi, Would you agree that it has not been done because it is not productive ? Thanks, GerardM
On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 12:18 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 5:19 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
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David Gerard wrote:
2008/10/3 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
Also, I may see that Erik Zachte made good dynamic statistics without using Flash (and without SVG, as far as I understand).
The <canvas> element of HTML5, in Firefox. That's what all the cool browsers are doing these days.
Which was my example of a preferred target technology. :)
Right. I wouldn't be opposed to using flash to run a drop-in <canvas> emulator (providing the emulator flash file itself was free software) for features where the rest of the code is regular old JS which ran without flash on modern browsers.
The important distinction currently between a flash video player and a <canvas> emulator is that the canvas emulator would be an option open to everyone at no cost while a flash video player currently requires codecs that require licensing due to patents. (For the codecs fees must be paid for encoders, decoders, and for usage of the encoded files).
So even if the use of the canvas emulator misses an opportunity to encourage people to install a <canvas> supporting browser that does not costs anyone their freedom or leaving anyone feeling forced to spend money. Any website could throw up the same JS code that uses the native HTML or free softwareFlash Canvas and pay fees to no one and be at no risk of litigation.
Those sorts of usage usually don't create any additional accessibility problems, nor create any materil security problems.
So yea, I agree that there could be possibly reasonable uses of Flash, which was exactly why I singled out flash video in my initial post in this thread. Such uses, which run afoul of no patents nor involve any proprietary-only features wouldn't be prohibited by the proposed file format resolution (as members of the subset of flash files which are not proprietary nor require unavailable codec patents). Sadly, Video is not currently one of them but it's the use of Flash everyone but Brion thinks of. ;)
Though I do wonder how many of the other uses would ever happen and how many are just idle speculation: For example we've had a Java bulk uploader (commonist) for *years* which could be web-started with nearly zero effort (throw the jar onto upload, and the rest could be done from sitejs) and make bulk uploading much easier. ... Yet, it hasn't been done.
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If we consider Internet Explorer like non-free formats and we follow the policy of "don't give users support so they move to free formats (go install that ...)", then we should display a red warning for people using IE to use Firefox, it should help in converting them. I won't repeat my suggestion of giving them blank pages. :)
On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 12:32 PM, Mohamed Magdy mohamed.m.k@gmail.comwrote:
If we consider Internet Explorer like non-free formats and we follow the policy of "don't give users support so they move to free formats (go install that ...)", then we should display a red warning for people using IE to use Firefox, it should help in converting them. I won't repeat my suggestion of giving them blank pages. :)
-- --alnokta _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Encouragement is nice, glaring red banners are not.
-Chad
2008/9/27 Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net:
To illustrate this with an example, maybe not the best but one that comes up often enough, consider video file formats. (Some of this is beyond my technical expertise, so please forgive any misstatements.) Adobe Flash has widespread adoption to the point of being near-universal. The company has also been moving to make it more open for people watching, distributing, and working on content in this environment. It's close to free, but I understand there are still some issues like patent "encumbrances" around Flash.
And issues about creating flash files. No cost to view more cost to create
Meanwhile, there are pure free software formats that do similar things but have pretty limited adoption.
Depends how you define limited adoption.
This brings up a number of questions. First of all, how important is multimedia content to us in general?
Varies from project to project. Spoken wikipedia appears to get a fair bit of use. Videos are seeing an increasing amount of use.
Considering both the investment to create it and the environment in which it's produced, historically it's a lot less amenable to free licensing. It's still useful, no doubt, but what measures should we take to promote it?
We should use it. In addition a fair bit of encyclopedic video has few issues with free licensing. Videos of animals. Videos of various bits of kit in action.
Back to the two manifestations of freedom I mentioned, how should we balance those? One possibility that's been raised is to allow Flash content so long as we require that it be encoded and distributed in a truly free format as well. Is that sort of approach an acceptable compromise?
No.
It would make it much easier to achieve wide distribution of free content, while still making sure that it's also available completely without restrictions, for those who find that important. Are there situations in which this compromise doesn't work out for some reason? Why? (And none of this has to be limited to the Flash video example, discussion of other formats and standards is welcome.)
There is no way the foundation can legally guarantee trandcodeing to non free formats.
In dealing with the limited adoption of certain free formats, some people have advocated a more evangelistic approach, if you will. Given the reach of Wikipedia in particular, it's suggested that our policy could push wider adoption of these formats. That may be, but the question is, how much is that push worth? What are the prospects for making those formats readable in the average reader's environment, and encouraging wider use as a standard?
Vorbis? about 100% (indeed they probably have software that can play vorbis files although I doubt they know it.
Theoda? Well we know firefox are looking at implementing it as part of a <video> tag. I'd estimate 50%
Dirca? BBC backed for some uses. It isn't going to go away but I can't see it hitting general use for a while
SVG? 100% alreadly largely supported
xcf? Not something most users worry about
Djvu? useful even with low user uptake.
Impress files? They would likely be useful for wikiversity. Use is open office appears to be going up.
Does an uncompromising approach result in significant progress, or would we simply be marginalizing the impact of our work?
At the present time videos and sound do not constitute a significantly large percentage of our work to have a significant impact.
And is it worth the "sacrifice" of the many people who would miss out on some of the knowledge we're sharing, because the free format isn't accessible to them? (That's also partly a problem of disseminating knowledge, of course.)
They are free to install free formats. We deny them nothing. We cannot make the same guarantee with unfree formats
If we adopt a compromise position as described earlier, how much do we lose in terms of promoting the freer formats?
They would end up limited to the people who compile their software from the source code.
Just a general response:
Wikipedia, being one of the top 10 websites on Earth, has enormous power. People are not going to go to a Wikipedia page and see a video and not want to play it. "A highly trustworthy site is using a video format that I can't view. I'll just give up".
No, they are going to follow the link "If you can't see this video click here" and install the viewer. You just then need to get some video into some mainstream articles. Wikipedia then has just single-handily expanded the install base for Theora, and it's down the slippery slope to widespread adoption.
mboverload wrote:
Just a general response:
Wikipedia, being one of the top 10 websites on Earth, has enormous power. People are not going to go to a Wikipedia page and see a video and not want to play it. "A highly trustworthy site is using a video format that I can't view. I'll just give up".
No, they are going to follow the link "If you can't see this video click here" and install the viewer. You just then need to get some video into some mainstream articles. Wikipedia then has just single-handily expanded the install base for Theora, and it's down the slippery slope to widespread adoption.
Do we have any evidence to support this?
On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 5:28 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
No, they are going to follow the link "If you can't see this video click here" and install the viewer. You just then need to get some video into some mainstream articles. Wikipedia then has just single-handily expanded the install base for Theora, and it's down the slippery slope to widespread adoption.
Do we have any evidence to support this?
To the more general question of "Does this approach work for anyone?", absolutely yes: Thats how flash was adopted. Sites said 'click-here'. People clicked. Some time later, massive adoption... An over simplification, but basically correct. Flash adoption happened without any major OS or browser vendors shipping flash support. It may be, however, that the above only works for youtube and strong-bad, and not Wikipedia.
We do have some direct. evidence, however. Back when the video player was something I ran off the toolserver there were complete access logs which allowed me to track how often the player worked for people and get a little bit of information on why it failed. I do not have the logs anymore, but I believe that I found something like 1/3rd of the IPs that did not support Java came back later with Java installed. (It helped that the player had a link to SUN's java download site). This measurement is not particularly good for a multitude of reasons and may not apply now (the current player does not have good links to help people install support), so I wouldn't suggest to giving it much weight, but it does demonstrate that objective data on this can be collected.
Considering the prior-probability ('it worked for flash'), I think it would be prudent to follow mboverload's assumption until data is collected that indicates otherwise. It's necessary to collect the data in any case since the same data can be used to help maximize the effect (it's why I was bothering to consider it myself back then: at the time no one was really advocating that we use flash, I needed to know in order to make the player work for more people)
2008/9/28 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com:
On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 5:28 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
No, they are going to follow the link "If you can't see this video click here" and install the viewer. You just then need to get some video into some mainstream articles. Wikipedia then has just single-handily expanded the install base for Theora, and it's down the slippery slope to widespread adoption.
Do we have any evidence to support this?
To the more general question of "Does this approach work for anyone?", absolutely yes: Thats how flash was adopted. Sites said 'click-here'. People clicked.
It's also how viruses and spyware become so prevalent - people generally don't understand what's going on and just do what they're told.
2008/9/28 Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org:
mboverload wrote:
Just a general response:
Wikipedia, being one of the top 10 websites on Earth, has enormous power. People are not going to go to a Wikipedia page and see a video and not want to play it. "A highly trustworthy site is using a video format that I can't view. I'll just give up".
No, they are going to follow the link "If you can't see this video click here" and install the viewer. You just then need to get some video into some mainstream articles. Wikipedia then has just single-handily expanded the install base for Theora, and it's down the slippery slope to widespread adoption.
Do we have any evidence to support this?
How do you think the various current things used became popular?
I doubt we could pick it up in download numbers. Java is fairly widespread already and VLC is already at over 81 million downloads. Might be able to find something with ffmpeg2theora but we don't have that much video content yet.
Michael Snow wrote:
I mentioned earlier that I wanted to discuss open standards and file formats in advance of the next board meeting.
Send a message to the public W3C-list, signed by you and Brion, that the Wikimedia Foundation wishes to hold a six-month discussion phase on which free, open video standard to use on MediaWiki and the Foundations wikis. State that you want all the browser guys involved in that discussion because you want this standard to be natively implemented in all consumer browsers within 18 months from now. Send it out as a press release as well.
The Foundation is a big boy now and can make such demands.
Ciao Henning
2008/9/28 Henning Schlottmann h.schlottmann@gmx.net:
Michael Snow wrote:
I mentioned earlier that I wanted to discuss open standards and file formats in advance of the next board meeting.
Send a message to the public W3C-list, signed by you and Brion, that the Wikimedia Foundation wishes to hold a six-month discussion phase on which free, open video standard to use on MediaWiki and the Foundations wikis. State that you want all the browser guys involved in that discussion because you want this standard to be natively implemented in all consumer browsers within 18 months from now. Send it out as a press release as well. The Foundation is a big boy now and can make such demands.
FWIW, I have myself noted on the HTML5 working group list (with disclaimers that I speak only as a volunteer and in no official capacity whatsoever!) that Wikimedia is free formats only for video, and at the moment that means Theora. So Apple and Nokia can try to sabotage the spec, but then people will discover their iPhone sucks for looking at Wikipedia, and that because Apple expressly decided not to support Theora.
That Theora support is inbuilt in the forthcoming Firefox 3.1 is a BIG WIN. Now the <video> element just has to work well enough ...
- d.
2008/9/28 Henning Schlottmann h.schlottmann@gmx.net:
Michael Snow wrote:
I mentioned earlier that I wanted to discuss open standards and file formats in advance of the next board meeting.
Send a message to the public W3C-list, signed by you and Brion, that the Wikimedia Foundation wishes to hold a six-month discussion phase on which free, open video standard to use on MediaWiki and the Foundations wikis. State that you want all the browser guys involved in that discussion because you want this standard to be natively implemented in all consumer browsers within 18 months from now. Send it out as a press release as well.
The Foundation is a big boy now and can make such demands.
Ciao Henning
Wikipedia is big when it comes to text. Video and sound less so.
Well put. SJ
On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 6:37 AM, Henning Schlottmann h.schlottmann@gmx.net wrote:
Michael Snow wrote:
I mentioned earlier that I wanted to discuss open standards and file formats in advance of the next board meeting.
Send a message to the public W3C-list, signed by you and Brion, that the Wikimedia Foundation wishes to hold a six-month discussion phase on which free, open video standard to use on MediaWiki and the Foundations wikis. State that you want all the browser guys involved in that discussion because you want this standard to be natively implemented in all consumer browsers within 18 months from now. Send it out as a press release as well.
The Foundation is a big boy now and can make such demands.
Ciao Henning
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Hello,
Flash is not working for everybody. With Linux on AMD64, I can watch videos in nearly all non-free formats, including AVI, MPEG, and Realplayer, but I still can't see any Flash. So it is a defintive NO for me.
Regards,
Yann
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Yann Forget wrote:
Hello,
Flash is not working for everybody. With Linux on AMD64, I can watch videos in nearly all non-free formats, including AVI, MPEG, and Realplayer, but I still can't see any Flash. So it is a defintive NO for me.
Keep in mind that your Linux/AMD64 system can probably already play Theora video, so would have no need to use a hypothetical backup Flash player. (Unless it's got an old broken Totem plugin. :)
- -- brion
On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 6:59 AM, Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net wrote:
I mentioned earlier that I wanted to discuss open standards and file formats in advance of the next board meeting. I'd especially like to look at how these issues relate to our mission. There are a variety of questions involved, which I'll summarize in terms of freedom - the freedom that providing access to knowledge can give the recipient, and the freedom that avoiding intellectual property restrictions can give our culture generally. I trust we'd all agree both of these are positive things in line with the Wikimedia Foundation's mission, which is what makes it difficult if we have to choose between them.
The more we move beyond simple text, the more intellectual property restrictions expand beyond simple copyright to increasing complexity (multiple rightsholders, patents, DRM, trademarks, database rights). Sometimes these things can be fairly benign, to the extent of being at least gratis-free, especially at the "consumer" level. Perhaps in terms of our effort to provide access to knowledge, they might not impose any real restrictions, except in extreme edge cases. But so far, we have a pretty strong commitment to absolute freedom, even with respect to areas that don't directly impact our work.
To illustrate this with an example, maybe not the best but one that comes up often enough, consider video file formats. (Some of this is beyond my technical expertise, so please forgive any misstatements.) Adobe Flash has widespread adoption to the point of being near-universal. The company has also been moving to make it more open for people watching, distributing, and working on content in this environment. It's close to free, but I understand there are still some issues like patent "encumbrances" around Flash. Meanwhile, there are pure free software formats that do similar things but have pretty limited adoption.
This brings up a number of questions. First of all, how important is multimedia content to us in general? Considering both the investment to create it and the environment in which it's produced, historically it's a lot less amenable to free licensing. It's still useful, no doubt, but what measures should we take to promote it?
Back to the two manifestations of freedom I mentioned, how should we balance those? One possibility that's been raised is to allow Flash content so long as we require that it be encoded and distributed in a truly free format as well. Is that sort of approach an acceptable compromise? It would make it much easier to achieve wide distribution of free content, while still making sure that it's also available completely without restrictions, for those who find that important. Are there situations in which this compromise doesn't work out for some reason? Why? (And none of this has to be limited to the Flash video example, discussion of other formats and standards is welcome.)
In dealing with the limited adoption of certain free formats, some people have advocated a more evangelistic approach, if you will. Given the reach of Wikipedia in particular, it's suggested that our policy could push wider adoption of these formats. That may be, but the question is, how much is that push worth? What are the prospects for making those formats readable in the average reader's environment, and encouraging wider use as a standard? Does an uncompromising approach result in significant progress, or would we simply be marginalizing the impact of our work? And is it worth the "sacrifice" of the many people who would miss out on some of the knowledge we're sharing, because the free format isn't accessible to them? (That's also partly a problem of disseminating knowledge, of course.)
Free formats _can_ be accessible to anyone, however proprietary formats are by definition unable to be accessed by everyone, and especially not to those who tinker and create new devices, like OLPC.
If we adopt a compromise position as described earlier, how much do we lose in terms of promoting the freer formats?
An uncompromising approach results in better adoption of free formats, which in turn result in better quality software to access those formats. The result is information that is actually free and easy to use, now and in the future. We haven't needed to compromise yet; why start now?
Video is a problem, but Flash is not the answer. The ability to upload files greater than 20Mb is the most prominent hurdle in that department.
Angr has a very nice parable about compromise on his user page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angr
-- John
2008/9/27 Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net:
Before I joined the board, I understand the board considered a resolution to create a file format policy. These are the kinds of questions we need to consider before we can set such a policy. We're not going to be passing anything at next week's meeting, though, the discussion isn't far enough along and it wouldn't be right to push it through with so little consultation. But we need to have the conversation, so I would like the community's feedback on this list, both now and feel free to continue during and after our meeting.
For the moment: as others have noted in this thread, there's no need for us to even consider compromise on audio and video formats, because we're winning. Theora and Vorbis will be supported in-browser by Firefox 3.1. (What's the stats for browser user agents on Wikimedia?)
For the future: we may have a reason to compromise temporarily at some times. As I understand it - and I strongly welcome correction if I'm wrong! - we put some Java software on the servers and loaded the Cortado Java viewer in browsers before Java was actually 100% free software, because Sun's programme for freeing Java was progressing nicely and there was little likelihood we'd be embarrassed by them failing to complete it. So it may not be a good idea to straightjacket ourselves.
- d.
On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net wrote:
To illustrate this with an example, maybe not the best but one that comes up often enough, consider video file formats. (Some of this is beyond my technical expertise, so please forgive any misstatements.) Adobe Flash has widespread adoption to the point of being near-universal. The company has also been moving to make it more open for people watching, distributing, and working on content in this environment. It's close to free, but I understand there are still some issues like patent "encumbrances" around Flash. Meanwhile, there are pure free software formats that do similar things but have pretty limited adoption.
Greg answered this much better than I possibly could, but I'll just chip in and say that more or less this entire paragraph is predicated on misconceptions. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that anything Flash (which is non-free) can do, Java (which is free and open-source) can also do, *and does*. Even if users' browsers don't natively support Ogg Theora, they can still view videos on Wikimedia without any extra setup using Cortado, which is packaged in the page. Go ahead and browse to any old video on Commons in your favorite browser. IE6 on Windows or whatever you like. You should be able to play it just fine:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:22-digital-clock-screencast.ogg
So any suggestion that we compromise is a solution looking for a problem, unless there's something I'm missing. If the video playback on Wikimedia is worse than on YouTube, as Greg says, that's because video is YouTube's entire business, and it's an afterthought for us. With the appropriate manpower, our video playback could be polished up a lot.
In dealing with the limited adoption of certain free formats, some people have advocated a more evangelistic approach, if you will. Given the reach of Wikipedia in particular, it's suggested that our policy could push wider adoption of these formats. That may be, but the question is, how much is that push worth? What are the prospects for making those formats readable in the average reader's environment, and encouraging wider use as a standard?
Very high. I doubt that Firefox 3.1's support for Ogg Theora in <video> (you can try it out in nightly builds right now, it mostly works) would have come about as soon as it did if Wikipedia didn't serve video solely in Theora format. Opera is the other browser that has experimental Theora support in some builds, and look at this quote from an Opera developers' page:
"The Ogg Theora format is a promising candidate, which has been chosen by Wikipedia." http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/a-call-for-video-on-the-web-opera-vid/
Wikipedia's influence here is important. We're a top-ten website and we can help to push web standards in a positive direction.
Unfortunately there's some reluctance right now to supporting Theora natively and by default in some browsers, like Safari, due to the risk of submarine patents. But those browsers can still use Cortado just fine, so again, no users lost.
Does an uncompromising approach result in significant progress, or would we simply be marginalizing the impact of our work? And is it worth the "sacrifice" of the many people who would miss out on some of the knowledge we're sharing, because the free format isn't accessible to them? (That's also partly a problem of disseminating knowledge, of course.) If we adopt a compromise position as described earlier, how much do we lose in terms of promoting the freer formats?
There might hypothetically be some situation in which it would be advantageous for Wikimedia to support non-free file formats, but video is not one right now.
On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 6:37 AM, Henning Schlottmann h.schlottmann@gmx.net wrote:
Send a message to the public W3C-list, signed by you and Brion, that the Wikimedia Foundation wishes to hold a six-month discussion phase on which free, open video standard to use on MediaWiki and the Foundations wikis. State that you want all the browser guys involved in that discussion because you want this standard to be natively implemented in all consumer browsers within 18 months from now. Send it out as a press release as well.
You realize that this discussion has already been going on for a long time on the HTML5 discussion list, right? For a considerable period, the HTML5 standard explicitly recommended that browsers support Theora for the <video> tag. That was dropped when Apple and Nokia objected that they didn't want to support it for fear of submarine-patent lawsuits:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/11/1339251
Everyone's aware that Wikimedia supports Theora, and it *has* made a difference. But video on Wikipedia is hardly so make-or-break that we could strongarm anyone into supporting our format of choice -- especially since their users can view it anyway as long as they have Java installed.
2008/9/28 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:
Unfortunately there's some reluctance right now to supporting Theora natively and by default in some browsers, like Safari, due to the risk of submarine patents.
Well, that's what Apple and Nokia say. Nokia also tried to advance the odious and bare-faced lie that Ogg Theora and Vorbis was a proprietary format (and thus MPEG-4 formats were a much better idea), so for some reason I'm reluctant to ascribe an excess of good faith to either company on this one.
I think that if users start thinking they suck for not providing Theora/Vorbis, their business interest will convince them to join the party soon enough. There's no way it's worth us compromising one jot in this regard.
But those browsers can still use Cortado just fine, so again, no users lost.
Particularly as Java is part of Mac OS X. (Not iPhone, but being left behind is what Apple get for trying to implement Trusted Computing.)
Everyone's aware that Wikimedia supports Theora, and it *has* made a difference. But video on Wikipedia is hardly so make-or-break that we could strongarm anyone into supporting our format of choice --
I did expressly ask whether we count as a large enough content provider, Hixie said "no." So obviously we need more and better video content ;-D
- d.
On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 4:06 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I did expressly ask whether we count as a large enough content provider, Hixie said "no." So obviously we need more and better video content ;-D
A large enough content provider for what purpose?
Michael Snow wrote:
In dealing with the limited adoption of certain free formats, some people have advocated a more evangelistic approach, if you will. Given the reach of Wikipedia in particular, it's suggested that our policy could push wider adoption of these formats. That may be, but the question is, how much is that push worth? What are the prospects for making those formats readable in the average reader's environment, and encouraging wider use as a standard? Does an uncompromising approach result in significant progress, or would we simply be marginalizing the impact of our work? And is it worth the "sacrifice" of the many people who would miss out on some of the knowledge we're sharing, because the free format isn't accessible to them? (That's also partly a problem of disseminating knowledge, of course.) If we adopt a compromise position as described earlier, how much do we lose in terms of promoting the freer formats?
My understanding, from a previous mailing list discussion, was that we can and hopefully will support Flash video. As long as the encoder license fees are reasonable in proportion to our other operational costs, adding proprietary video formats alongside free ones can only increase the dissemination of knowledge and assist in our educational mission.
-- Tim Starling
On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
My understanding, from a previous mailing list discussion, was that we can
Your understanding is entirely different from my own. Possibly we were reading different mailing lists?
My takeaway from the lists I was on was better summed by by this comment by Brion Vibber in response to Kaltura's video software: "We won't even consider touching the software itself with a hundred-foot pole until they can support the free environment and formats we require. That's a condition they're well aware of."
As long as the encoder license fees are reasonable in proportion to our other operational costs, adding proprietary video formats alongside free ones can only increase the dissemination of knowledge and assist in our educational mission.
As you can see from the other replies here, several people believe that supporting non-free formats would be detrimental to the long-term educational mission -- because the mission is not fulfillable so long as people feel forced to pay a codec tax on content they take from us. Just because Wikimedia can afford it does not mean that everyone can or should. (Regarding fees, most formats have per-use fees as well as encoder fees.)
You could just as easily say "As long as the licensing fees are reasonable in proportion to our other operational costs, adding commercial stock photography archives to Wikipedia alongside free images can only increase the dissemination of knowledge and assist in our educational mission." WMF could easily afford to license stock archives. Yet it has not. The great demand for images in Wikipedia allowed Commons to succeed, and now the whole world has a liberally-licensed stock photography archive that they can use.
In any case, mere assertions are not a compelling argument. If you disagree that freely-licensed formats are essential for realizing the promise of freely-licensed content, I'm sure many people would be willing to talk that out. If you don't think that sticking to free formats exclusively drives adoption, that too can be discussed... or if you don't agree that realizing the promises of freely licensed content are part of the mission, likewise.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
My understanding, from a previous mailing list discussion, was that we can
Your understanding is entirely different from my own. Possibly we were reading different mailing lists?
My takeaway from the lists I was on was better summed by by this comment by Brion Vibber in response to Kaltura's video software: "We won't even consider touching the software itself with a hundred-foot pole until they can support the free environment and formats we require. That's a condition they're well aware of."
I was also completely opposed to any deal with Kaltura. But I'm not opposed to on-the-fly conversion from a free archival format to a non-free display format, and I think that's a totally different issue.
With display formats, there's no lock-in, we can drop support at any time, and the costs may well be laughably low or zero.
If you think it's going to be expensive after 2010, then we could support FLV/H.264 as a display format until then, and then drop it. Maybe by that time, the Thusnelda branch will be finished, and we'll have an codec library which is competitive with H.264 in terms of output quality. Nobody is going to stop working on libtheora just because we start transcoding our Theora videos to alternative formats.
A framework for transcoding into multiple formats may be useful at that time even if we don't want to use MPEG anymore, since we might want to start promulgating Dirac.
-- Tim Starling
On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 10:42 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
I was also completely opposed to any deal with Kaltura. But I'm not opposed to on-the-fly conversion from a free archival format to a non-free display format, and I think that's a totally different issue.
There are multiple issues with Kaltura. That fact that it is a hosted solution, that it's basically not open (No SVN activity in the last three months, only ever released that little flash player code and the trivial mediawiki embedder), that many people thought its 'slideshow' nature was a poor fit, that wikimedians haven't bothered using it, that it appears to be dead on the mediawiki sites that have deployed it... and that it requires proprietary codecs.
So I guess we disagree on the codecs issue, but probably not most of rest.
With display formats, there's no lock-in, we can drop support at any time, and the costs may well be laughably low or zero.
"The cost is $X, but if we don't pay it, then Y% will suddenly be unable to play our video!"
Y is much lower if people have been spending the last two years installing codecs, Java, or switching to Firefox but they will not install these things. Y is also lower when vendors are encouraged to support these formats out of the box because just-working with Wikipedia is nice.
Tim, I know I'm getting repetitive here, but if there were no lock-in you wouldn't be suggesting flash as a display format at all. You're not suggesting that it would further our mission to adopt parallel articles in DOCX, etc. It's the very fact that there is lock-in which leaves us stuck with these problems.
Increased adoption is the only way to avoid that lock-in.
...and If display format support is so easy, why can't I watch most content on archive.org without proprietary codecs? even though they have a transcoding infrastructure? Why is it that Wikipedia Weekly (and offsite radio show about Wikipedia) routinely had broken OGGs while the aac files always worked (I can't comment on their recent performance, but this was certainly the case many times in the past)?
Maybe by that time, the Thusnelda branch will be finished, and we'll have an codec library which is competitive with H.264 in terms of output quality.
Do you actually think the difference in quality per bitrate between the current Theora encoder and H.264 has any relevance to us?
We have video uploaded at 10mbit/sec in Ogg/Theora. Perhaps a leading edge H.264 could deliver the same quality with 7 mbit/sec. What difference does it make?
Beyond a certain quality vs bitrate threshold, basically, "can you offer watchable video over low end broadband?", improved quality doesn't buy much. Theora is well past that threshold, but unfortunately other possible free choices are not anywhere near it (MJPEG, etc).
Youtube's experience shows that if you want video that just works you need to be transcoding to ~250kbit/sec. All codecs perform fairly poorly a that bitrate, and the difference between H.264 and the current theora encoder is not very large (...and current Theora looks nicer than the VP6 youtube has been using at those bitrates for compatibility with flash 7(?), in any case).
The obvious way forward is to offer multiple bitrates: Low bitrates for video that just works, higher bitrates (served over WMF's least cost pipes) for higher quality for people with faster links or greater patience. Once you're doing that the quality differences between codecs should only decide choices among otherwise-equals.
We figured this out for still images how many years ago? :)
Nobody is going to stop working on libtheora just because we start transcoding our Theora videos to alternative formats.
If not a single line of code were ever committed again to libtheora it would be no great harm. The format works and doesn't need any more development to be working.
"It's the client that counts"
As you noted: changing the server side isn't that big a deal... Except that the server has to be compatible with the clients and changing an installed base of hundreds of millions of people (the audience of Wikipedia) take *years*. We're a good way into it, why stop now as we are gaining momentum, as pointed out by others in this thread?
A framework for transcoding into multiple formats may be useful at that time even if we don't want to use MPEG anymore, since we might want to start promulgating Dirac.
Other formats? Meh. Large scale conversions end up needing to be big batch jobs in any case. Other bitrates? *Absolutely essential* But we have none of that today.
Take a look at this: http://www.vquence.com.au/metrics-blog.html
It's a list of features Youtube has. Few of these have any flash interaction and I do not believe any are video format specific. I don't see anything that couldn't be done with HTML5 Video+JS and freely licensed formats.
Yet with only a couple of exceptions we have no parallel to most of these features, and I don't think youtube is widely considered a particularly featureful site. (Heck, they've recently dropped their parallel to our small upload limit, as I understand it!)
If we want to be serious about delivering good video support the current lack of client-side Theora support is not one of the largest barriers. There are many other important features that we lack which are true for any format, and which are difficult to solve.
By the time we get around to implementing all the other parts needed to do video well the codec issue may well be a moot one.
Thanks for taking the time to respond to me, I do respect your opinion, even though I think it's a very "server centric" one, and I don't agree with it's applicability as project policy. :)
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
"The cost is $X, but if we don't pay it, then Y% will suddenly be unable to play our video!"
I don't think that's a problem. We can give the users plenty of warning, and by that time, the client software will be more mature. Theora will be supported in Firefox, and the free clients will be more stable. I don't see Theora losing ground in that time.
[...]
Tim, I know I'm getting repetitive here, but if there were no lock-in you wouldn't be suggesting flash as a display format at all. You're not suggesting that it would further our mission to adopt parallel articles in DOCX, etc. It's the very fact that there is lock-in which leaves us stuck with these problems.
I'm suggesting Flash because I believe that education, not promotion of free software, should be our goal. We should only support free software as far as it supports that goal. As a community, we believe that free software supports our goal a great deal, and that we should use it everywhere where it is practical.
Various organisations have distributed Wikipedia text in non-free formats, and I hope we continue to encourage that.
Increased adoption is the only way to avoid that lock-in.
It's not lock-in if we pay the same price now, by excluding people without Theora players, as we would pay in the future, by excluding those same people.
You argue that we would have to exclude more people in the future, as a consequence of Theora losing ground compared to where it is now. I think you are overestimating this effect.
[...]
Maybe by that time, the Thusnelda branch will be finished, and we'll have an codec library which is competitive with H.264 in terms of output quality.
Do you actually think the difference in quality per bitrate between the current Theora encoder and H.264 has any relevance to us?
Not directly, but technical parity might help to convince vendors to support it.
[...]
If we want to be serious about delivering good video support the current lack of client-side Theora support is not one of the largest barriers. There are many other important features that we lack which are true for any format, and which are difficult to solve.
Granted. But on principle, I don't want the lack of support for commercial client software to be written into our bylaws.
-- Tim Starling
On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 2:16 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
"The cost is $X, but if we don't pay it, then Y% will suddenly be unable to play our video!"
I don't think that's a problem. We can give the users plenty of warning, and by that time, the client software will be more mature. Theora will be supported in Firefox, and the free clients will be more stable. I don't see Theora losing ground in that time.
[...]
Tim, I know I'm getting repetitive here, but if there were no lock-in you wouldn't be suggesting flash as a display format at all. You're not suggesting that it would further our mission to adopt parallel articles in DOCX, etc. It's the very fact that there is lock-in which leaves us stuck with these problems.
I'm suggesting Flash because I believe that education, not promotion of free software, should be our goal. We should only support free software as far as it supports that goal. As a community, we believe that free software supports our goal a great deal, and that we should use it everywhere where it is practical.
Various organisations have distributed Wikipedia text in non-free formats, and I hope we continue to encourage that.
Wikimedia Foundation should focus heavily on free content available in free formats. True freedom includes the freedom for other organisations to distribute the content in non-free formats if that suits their mission.
WMF is primarily a platform for community *creation* of free content in a re-usable format. The delivery of that content to end-users can be achieved in many ways by many other organisations, who may dabble in non-free formats if they wish.
Increased adoption is the only way to avoid that lock-in.
It's not lock-in if we pay the same price now, by excluding people without Theora players, as we would pay in the future, by excluding those same people.
You argue that we would have to exclude more people in the future, as a consequence of Theora losing ground compared to where it is now. I think you are overestimating this effect.
[...]
Maybe by that time, the Thusnelda branch will be finished, and we'll have an codec library which is competitive with H.264 in terms of output quality.
Do you actually think the difference in quality per bitrate between the current Theora encoder and H.264 has any relevance to us?
Not directly, but technical parity might help to convince vendors to support it.
[...]
If we want to be serious about delivering good video support the current lack of client-side Theora support is not one of the largest barriers. There are many other important features that we lack which are true for any format, and which are difficult to solve.
Granted. But on principle, I don't want the lack of support for commercial client software to be written into our bylaws.
Our bylaws should require that all content is *stored* and *distributed* in open standards, for the purposes of archival and accessibility.
I can see merit in WMF transcoding the content to proprietary formats for *readers*, but I hope WMF doesnt spend its money doing this without putting a detailed proposal to the community.
-- John V.
On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 12:16 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote: [snip]
I'm suggesting Flash because I believe that education, not promotion of free software, should be our goal. We should only support free software as far as it supports that goal. As a community, we believe that free software supports our goal a great deal, and that we should use it everywhere where it is practical.
Where did free software come into this discussion. It's orthogonal, almost entirely so. The formats we use have BSD licensed reference implementations and are supported in a great many pieces of proprietary software.
I very much wish a particular piece of proprietary software, Microsoft Windows, integrated Ogg/Theora support because then I very much think the discussion of flash video would be over. (Microsoft ships Xiph codecs in many other products... so it's less unreasonable than you might guess, though even Adobe ships Ogg/Speex in Flash, but I'm told that Theora has no chance in flash today).
I use proprietary software to convert proprietary formats into ones suitable for Wikipedia. You don't hear me howling that the office uses many Mac (though I did like it when Danny had Ubuntu(?) on his desktop).
I think we're in agreement on the role of free software in Wikimedia But formats are not software. At the time I first setup the Java video player for Wikimedia, Java itself was still fairly proprietary (though I did get the player working in GCJ first). If Flash played free media formats and you were to propose to use flash *only* for that purpose, I would not pose an objection. (though for other purpose, flash has other problems).
Our mission is not merely education, but educational content under free content licenses. This much is clear, unambiguously stated, and not currently up for debate. It's a key differentiation between Wikimedia and hundreds of thousands of other educators.
Those licenses grant rights -- like the ability to create derivatives or verbatim distribution at no cost and without asking for permission -- which are not realistically possible in a world where using a no-cost format means that only computer geeks can view the result, or where you have to republish via a site like Wikimedia who will pay some of the licensing fees for you.
Various organisations have distributed Wikipedia text in non-free formats, and I hope we continue to encourage that.
I'd hope that we'd encourage them to use free formats where at all possible, while still doing whatever good thing they are doing. But they are not us, and what they do is their concern, not ours.
Depending on the exact nature of their non-free formats and their usage that action may be in violation of the licensing: Producing DRM locked enhanced versions is expressly forbidden by both the FDL and by the CC-By-SA family of licenses. I would hope that Wikimedia is wise enough to not encourage any such illegal and arguably unethical activity.
[snip]
You argue that we would have to exclude more people in the future, as a consequence of Theora losing ground compared to where it is now. I think you are overestimating this effect.
It doesn't have to lose ground: Our perspective on costs will change. After a couple years of flash video, do you really think that going back to where we are now would be an equally easy decision than we have now in staying the course?
As Kat's post states: Formats enjoy tremendous network effects. For things with strong network effect we expect logistic or exponential like growth curves: Investing $10 today is not the same as investing $10 ten years from now.
Our video support sucks in a dozen ways unrelated to not offering non-free video. The added cost of telling people to download another codec/player is not huge compared to the other issues. Once that changes the argument will be different. Internet users of today are very accustomed to installing software: If the iPhone is at all predictive, we may simply not have the same opportunities in the future.
I may well be overestimating the effect our use will have in the future, but I know my past expectations were underestimates.
Someone has to pay a cost to get the free formats adopted: What this argument is really fundamentally about is "Shall we take a gamble and try to externalize that cost?"
Of all the large websites we're the least likely to tolerate non-free formats, since we actually see non-freeness itself as a cost. Many other large sites actually gain an advantage from the non-freeness. What does that say about the probability of others picking up that cost if we do not? I do not think it is a good gamble at all.
I don't even think that the cost is all that great: In a frictionless market we would expect the codec prices to singular large organizations (like Wikimedia), or at least co-operating collections (too bad that almost all other big media sites are either MPEG patent holders or in brutal competition with each other) to be roughly comparable to the cost of spurring adoption. I'm not aware of any studies of this, but its easy to see the drop in competing audio codec licensing fees that happened when Ogg/Vorbis went 1.0. It's probably even less for us because the pricing was probably designed for groups with a decreased incompatibility tolerance. ... Though I guess by letting OS vendors pay the decoder fees, and Free Software users/vendors by via legal liability, downstream users by their need to pay royalties, we probably can externalize the majority of the cost associated with a decision to use non-free formats.
... Enough waxing economic.
Do you actually think the difference in quality per bitrate between the current Theora encoder and H.264 has any relevance to us?
Not directly, but technical parity might help to convince vendors to support it.
Perhaps. But do you not think that "Wikipedia requires it?" would not be a much more effective argument (at least for a web-browsing device).
I've talked to hardware makers about format support in the past, and it's all about market size. I really don't think anything else matters at all: Even fees. If H.264 cost $25/device (I think the original licensing needed DVD players were that high), and H.264 is required by the market, they'll simply pass the cost on, since all the major players will be compelled to pay the same fees.
Codec licensing normally has per-company annual caps, so the largest companies with the most ability to cause adoption actually see a competitive advantage vs smaller competition caused by the non-free formats that they have to pay for.
Granted. But on principle, I don't want the lack of support for commercial client software to be written into our bylaws.
Fantastic! because no one has proposed that. Seriously.
Please don't confuse free formats with free software. Freely licensed software needs free formats. Freely licensed content needs free formats. But Freely licensed formats have advantages to even to people who care nothing about either of those two things.
The free codecs we use today have BSD licensed reference implementations (a direct recommendation by RMS, in fact, for the express purpose of encouraging adoption by proprietary software). Free media formats are used in many pieces proprietary software, and shipped by the largest proprietary software vendor in the world (though sadly not with their web browser). Flash includes Speex, mostly likely due to Speex's through domination of a particular market segment.
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Gregory Maxwell wrote:
...and If display format support is so easy, why can't I watch most content on archive.org without proprietary codecs? even though they have a transcoding infrastructure?
Because they're not as pathologically ideological about patented vs patent-free formats as we are. :)
Archive.org transcodes videos to Flash for their inline player, presumably because it's most convenient for them and it gets the job done.
We're not always as interested in what's most convenient, though we do like to at least consider it.
Given that the Java player in addition to increasing native browser support gives us a pretty wide "install-free player" base, we don't have a _huge_ incentive at this time to jump through hoops to add Flash transcoding.
It wouldn't hurt to have some more current hard figures, though, as we don't really have a good idea of how wide that base really is.
We'd _like_ to know:
1) What % of readers have a browser configuration that already works with our Theora players (either Java or native)
2) What % of readers have a browser configuration that would play Flash video without additional effort
3) What % of those who *don't* have a Theora- or Java-ready browser *do* have a Flash-ready browser (this fraction would be the only one to get a clear, hard benefit from additional Flash support -- not having to install anything else to play videos)
I'd also really like to know:
4) How often do the various Theora players encounter failures? (Eg, the Java player loads but then breaks -- we've seen platform-specific issues before). This may be harder to measure in an automated fashion; can we distinguish a browser crash or a failure to buffer from just navigating away from the page?
and
5) How easy are the players to use, and what should we do to improve them?
For these last it'd be more helpful to do a survey. This doesn't necessarily have to focus on potential Flash adoption -- simply making our existing tools better is important and will benefit from having a better idea of how people are being served than just the occasional bug reports we get.
- -- brion
On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
My understanding, from a previous mailing list discussion, was that we can and hopefully will support Flash video. As long as the encoder license fees are reasonable in proportion to our other operational costs, adding proprietary video formats alongside free ones can only increase the dissemination of knowledge and assist in our educational mission.
This wasn't my understanding. What I'd seen was that even considering it was dependent on a lot of "if"s, licensing fees not being the most important of them.
Existing practice (and unwritten policy) is not to use any file formats that are not free. The resolution as proposed http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_format_policy was intended to set down more explicitly what that means as well as to provide the rationale, precisely so it would be easy to resolve the questions of what formats should be accepted. (Comments and revisions from the community would still be welcomed through the week.)
I could write a new argument for it but instead I'll copy the message I wrote to the board list when the resolution was proposed:
----
I'd say without thinking I go too far out on a limb that we all think having thriving and universally usable free formats is a state of the world we should support. So from there -- viable free formats are necessary to ensure the continued ability of individuals to freely create and distribute free content. And allowing individuals to freely create and distribute free content is a core goal of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Given that, my strong preference is against parallel distribution. Not because I don't agree that we should reach more people, but because it's sacrificing a long-term goal for a short-term benefit. And because of that I do not agree that we are obligated to maximize short-term reach. We are obligated to do that which best fulfills our mission of providing -- and continuing to be able to provide -- free educational content.
[The message this was in reply to says] that the only reason not to is because we value free formats for their own sake over a wider reach, but this is incorrect. If the free formats are not used by anyone, they die. When you say that the free formats are not as good and that we need to provide others to reach people, you're effectively saying that there's no truly free format, that it is not thriving, that there is some real or perceived cost to using the free format which prevents people from using it. You're saying implicitly that because there is no broadly-adopted free format, there exists a need for one.
The proprietary formats are not fundamentally easier to use than the free formats, but the users have already installed whatever it is they need to install to view the proprietary content from other websites, and so without incentive to do otherwise, they will take the easiest route and use the format they know and already use. Huge network effects apply in format adoption -- people use a format because other people are using it. To whoever has, more shall be given... unless there is some sort of powerful force bringing change.
These other formats aren't free, and they may restrict the ability to freely create content in the future. (There are, currently, no free creation toolsets for Flash.) For many there are no licensing fees or broad restrictions on use now. But by establishing and enabling dependence on these formats, we cripple our ability to reject those terms when this changes. Licensing terms for proprietary formats have customarily been priced as high as licensees are willing to bear before it's a better deal to incur the costs of switching to a different format.
The other media providers are, with rare exception, not providing the free formats. (Many of them have made deals that explicitly involve refusing to distribute media in certain free formats in exchange for a better deal on the formats they do provide, in fact.) Without a body of work already in the free format to encourage people to use it, and to have the codecs installed, no one else will use it either.
[...] One of Nokia's points [regarding video standards in HTML5] was that Theora was irrelevant, as nobody uses it. Those writing contrary positions cited WMF's use and said no, it is in use, and in fact there's a top-10 site that only uses Theora, and for the same reasons that it's being proposed as a web standard. Without Wikimedia's use, this statement would have been much less powerful.
I do think that in support of this we should make it as easy as possible to use the free formats. Our media help pages currently give good guidance on this, and things like the WikiMediaPlayer (OggHandler) have made the free formats usable for most who visit without any additional effort on their part. And most users really don't care which format it is as long as it plays. The free formats are not harder to use. (At least, no harder to use than anything else that requires installation -- such as RealPlayer or Flash plugins.) They don't require technical expertise. They don't require users to know or care about free software and open standards. They're just less popular.
But if we compromise this goal -- and I think we can agree that having a thriving free format for all media types is a goal -- we drastically lower the chances of anyone else being able to bring it about without us. We shouldn't act in a way that hurts the future our mission is supposed to bring about. ----
Apart from some flowery writing I might like to edit, this is still my position.
-Kat
So Gnash is really not making any headway, hm?
regards, Brianna
2008/9/28 Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net:
To illustrate this with an example, maybe not the best but one that comes up often enough, consider video file formats. (Some of this is beyond my technical expertise, so please forgive any misstatements.) Adobe Flash has widespread adoption to the point of being near-universal. The company has also been moving to make it more open for people watching, distributing, and working on content in this environment. It's close to free, but I understand there are still some issues like patent "encumbrances" around Flash. Meanwhile, there are pure free software formats that do similar things but have pretty limited adoption.
Gnash is making some headway. It needs more support and testing, however. Having more collections of media that are explicitly prepped to work with Gnash players will make a tremendous difference to its small core team, who aren't all that visible in the broader FOSS community.
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=gnash
SJ
On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 3:12 AM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
So Gnash is really not making any headway, hm?
regards, Brianna
2008/9/28 Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net:
To illustrate this with an example, maybe not the best but one that comes up often enough, consider video file formats. (Some of this is beyond my technical expertise, so please forgive any misstatements.) Adobe Flash has widespread adoption to the point of being near-universal. The company has also been moving to make it more open for people watching, distributing, and working on content in this environment. It's close to free, but I understand there are still some issues like patent "encumbrances" around Flash. Meanwhile, there are pure free software formats that do similar things but have pretty limited adoption.
-- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/
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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.
Please note that a new version of VLC has just been released.
The user interface for the basic commands is much, much nicer now.
On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 2:10 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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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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I will quickly weigh in on this thread:
First context: (I developed metavid.org (a wiki congress video archive) and presently working with kaltura & wikimeida on the early stages of a ogg theora html5 collaborative video editing solution)
We at the (much much smaller) metavid project faced a similar issue of accessibility vs free/freedom a few months ago. As an explicitly free & patented unencumbered software project for the first 2 years we had exclusively used ogg Theora for our video archive. There was subsequently a strong push to improve accessibility and support flash. The solution was to do a fall back distribution of the flash codec decoupled from the player.
Presently on the metavid site you can play back the flash video streams with either VLC or the flash plugin. If your client supports it you can play the ogg stream with vlc, native browser support, or cortado. Key to this fall back solution is the user interface is identical regardless of whatever method your playing back the content with. All the play head controls, scripted interactions with transcript editing, remote embed scripts, transcript playback are abstracted away from the player. This is in some ways comparable to canvas emulation in flash that brion mentioned.
I think if the fullback approach is properly implemented it facilitates larger accessibility and hence entices much more wide scale usage of the video functionality. Ultimately allowing you to more actively promote free software solutions as an experience with identical or improved quality without the costs of proprietary codecs.
As Erik mentioned in this thread more data about playback would be helpfull and by request I have hacked up a simple video player data collector and survey on the ogg / flash playback support situation. Should be ready to deploy shortly.
--michael
Michael Snow wrote:
I mentioned earlier that I wanted to discuss open standards and file formats in advance of the next board meeting. I'd especially like to look at how these issues relate to our mission. There are a variety of questions involved, which I'll summarize in terms of freedom - the freedom that providing access to knowledge can give the recipient, and the freedom that avoiding intellectual property restrictions can give our culture generally. I trust we'd all agree both of these are positive things in line with the Wikimedia Foundation's mission, which is what makes it difficult if we have to choose between them.
The more we move beyond simple text, the more intellectual property restrictions expand beyond simple copyright to increasing complexity (multiple rightsholders, patents, DRM, trademarks, database rights). Sometimes these things can be fairly benign, to the extent of being at least gratis-free, especially at the "consumer" level. Perhaps in terms of our effort to provide access to knowledge, they might not impose any real restrictions, except in extreme edge cases. But so far, we have a pretty strong commitment to absolute freedom, even with respect to areas that don't directly impact our work.
To illustrate this with an example, maybe not the best but one that comes up often enough, consider video file formats. (Some of this is beyond my technical expertise, so please forgive any misstatements.) Adobe Flash has widespread adoption to the point of being near-universal. The company has also been moving to make it more open for people watching, distributing, and working on content in this environment. It's close to free, but I understand there are still some issues like patent "encumbrances" around Flash. Meanwhile, there are pure free software formats that do similar things but have pretty limited adoption.
This brings up a number of questions. First of all, how important is multimedia content to us in general? Considering both the investment to create it and the environment in which it's produced, historically it's a lot less amenable to free licensing. It's still useful, no doubt, but what measures should we take to promote it?
Back to the two manifestations of freedom I mentioned, how should we balance those? One possibility that's been raised is to allow Flash content so long as we require that it be encoded and distributed in a truly free format as well. Is that sort of approach an acceptable compromise? It would make it much easier to achieve wide distribution of free content, while still making sure that it's also available completely without restrictions, for those who find that important. Are there situations in which this compromise doesn't work out for some reason? Why? (And none of this has to be limited to the Flash video example, discussion of other formats and standards is welcome.)
In dealing with the limited adoption of certain free formats, some people have advocated a more evangelistic approach, if you will. Given the reach of Wikipedia in particular, it's suggested that our policy could push wider adoption of these formats. That may be, but the question is, how much is that push worth? What are the prospects for making those formats readable in the average reader's environment, and encouraging wider use as a standard? Does an uncompromising approach result in significant progress, or would we simply be marginalizing the impact of our work? And is it worth the "sacrifice" of the many people who would miss out on some of the knowledge we're sharing, because the free format isn't accessible to them? (That's also partly a problem of disseminating knowledge, of course.) If we adopt a compromise position as described earlier, how much do we lose in terms of promoting the freer formats?
Before I joined the board, I understand the board considered a resolution to create a file format policy. These are the kinds of questions we need to consider before we can set such a policy. We're not going to be passing anything at next week's meeting, though, the discussion isn't far enough along and it wouldn't be right to push it through with so little consultation. But we need to have the conversation, so I would like the community's feedback on this list, both now and feel free to continue during and after our meeting.
--Michael Snow
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