On Mon, 4 Oct 2004 10:47:19 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I see merit in both positions. By taking a stand for OGG over MP3, we are inconveniencing people in the name of free content. We have an obligation to minimize that inconvenience, and this might be in part be resolved by hosting some GPL software and very user-friendly instructions for installing it. We can decide on a case by case basis.
A lot of GPL software is hosted on nerdy websites that would simply frighten inexperienced users. When that's the case, it would be nice if we used our public communication skills to help out.
This is one of the things I was trying to work on with the ideas I was putting on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia I'm going to have a go at drafting my suggested Help: page now, complete with the links to various means of listening to ogg vorbis files. (And now I think, perhaps some instructions, too) Note that most of these are plugins for whatever media player you already have, not a whole new piece of software.
But perhaps it *would* be nice to have a "wiki-player" that just read in an ogg, and played it, and nothing else, for people who don't have a media player at all. It could actually be considered, in a vague kind of way, to be part of the site software: if playing oggs is part of using the wiki, then an ogg player is part of the interface.
Of course, what would be *really* nice, would be if we could *embed* the player, but that might be a bit awkward.