Why can't we simply use the avi or mpeg formats again? Do we have to pay someone to encode the file, or what's the deal? Those formats for video would get the widest reach of any file format.
James
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andre Engels Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 1:19 PM To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Video uploaded...
I still protest the policies on this point. In the name of freedom, we are enforcing a non-standard format, giving people extra problems to just hear and see the sound files and videos on Wikipedia. Wikipedia should be there for the normal internet user, not just for tech-savy open-source-loving nerds.
My computer when seeing a .ogg-file, automatically assumes it's a sound file, and thus I cannot see this movie. I know there are others who don't even have software for .ogg-soundfiles. We are much too strict on this point. What should bother us is not whether there are any patents on a certain format, but whether free software exists to play it. Where that is the case (for the most common platforms, or at the very least for Windows and Unix), rejecting files because their format is supposedly non-free is doing a disservice to our readers and writers with no actual advantage to compensate for it.
Andre Engels
On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 16:04:44 +1100, Robert Graham Merkel robert.merkel@benambra.org wrote:
In the grand tradition of actually getting things done on Wikipedia, Wikipedian KSheka, with some assistance from myself to convert the video to Theora, has gone ahead and uploaded a video of an "echocardiograph demonstrating systolic anterior motion of the anterior leaflet of the mitral value", which, translated, I think means "a video of a beating heart with a valve that's moving wrongly"
You can see the article with the uploaded video at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertrophic_cardiomyopathy
Now we actually *have* a video in a patent-unencumbered codec uploaded to Wikipedia, and the ability to make more of them (transcoding to Theora is pretty straightforward once you've got ffmpeg2theora installed), the discussion about video I posted at http://meta.wikimedia.org/Video_policy becomes a little more directly relevant...
From my point of view, I'd be very interested in people's thoughts on
what we should do to make best use of video (one thing that comes to mind is that we should always take a still from the video as illustration, but more thoughts are good)...
Oh, and has there been any progress on implementing code for an approval process?
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Robert Merkel robert.merkel@benambra.org http://benambra.org"And James Hird has just gone after Robert Harvey...that's like Bambi attacking Bambi"
-- Gerard Whately, Essendon vs. St Kilda, 3/4/2004
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