Robert Graham Merkel wrote: That's only the case if we're GNU-style ideologues. There are, of course, other video formats that work, which millions of people use daily, and which we could easily start using tomorrow. Indeed, some of them, notably MPEG, have large bodies of existing public-domain video available from various public archives, which would only be usable at a significant reduction in quality if we transcoded it to Theora. Personally I prefer Theora once the tools are available, but I don't see it as a "Theora or nothing" choice. It's "between Theora and MPEG, MPEG currently is far superior, but in the future I would lean slightly towards Theora if support for it were good." -Mark

I know this is drifting off topic (oh, crap, I'm not even subscribed to this list am I - there's too many!) but I did look through some of the stuff on the MNG controversy. The first thing I want to say is - since when has Mozilla, or *any* browser, or in fact any software distributed by anyone other than Macromedia, been able to play Flash files!? I don't know what's so "!!" about animated GIFs either, they may have recent legal problems, but they've been the standard format since the dawn of time. The reason MNG support was dropped from Mozilla was that the existing implementation was seen as too big, and they've been on a mission to unbloat their code for some time. That no effort gathered speed to radically rewrite said code is, indeed, partly to do with attitude - but when it's a case of browser-makers implementing code that no website uses, versus website-makers using features that no browser implements, it's bound to be a bit chicken and egg. But we don't have to worry about that, because we're not proposing software to *process* any such media, only distribute it. ---- My view is that the situation is relatively straight-forward. I've more often thought about it with audio formats (although come to think, the case I'm about to mention does include video too) - bbc.co.uk includes audio streams (both live and archived), and audio and video clips, all in RealMedia formats. I have no doubt that this has caused thousands of people to download software capable of using these formats; I similarly have no doubt that had the BBC standardised on something else (say, Windows Media, if that had been in existence at the right moment) those thousands of people would have downloaded a different piece of software. If we are serious about encouraging multimedia content on Wikipedia, there is no reason the same should not be true for us. Therefore, we should look at our alternatives - most have some form of legal restrictions attached, even if it is merely on the processing of data by contributors (e.g. mp3 encoders); the Ogg formats win here. In terms of user *choice* of software, mp3 playback is probably the most universal, but Ogg Vorbis must come a close second; as for video, coverage seems to vary enormously as far as I can make out. In terms of user *convenience*, a large proportion of users will have computers on which Windows Media Player was pre-installed; thus score one for mp3, wma, wmv, and whatever video codecs are installed by default. An additional point that came into my head from the bbc.co.uk example was that there is some benefit to using a *family* of formats - they use RealAudio and RealVideo because one piece of software allows both; I would suspect that something vaguely analagous will emerge for Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora, in that players that do audio and video (many do) will come with support for both or neither - so if we stick with Vorbis, it would make sense to stick with Theora too (possibly). Geez, I didn't realise this was going to be such a long message. Hopefully it contains something for someone to think about... -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]

Rowan Collins [IMSoP] wrote: == Reply == Wait, wait. You know why there were exclamation marks? Because those are not open-source and/or not free things. Gerv, Greg and Glenn, the 3G as I call them, are wonderful people who did their best to make the code suitable for the “maintainers” needs and whims. It can be well seen that those with power in the issue didn’t do anything to support the free and open solution, even worse, this has been said [1]: | While these formats have some interesting features, I think it's | worth considering removal of this decoder from the mozilla tree. | Some of the reasons: | | * mng decoder module is roughly the same size as all the other | image decoders and libpr0n logic combined. | | Linux sizes: | | 261796 libimglib2.so | 241492 libimgmng.so | | MS-Windows sizes: | | 155024 imglib2.dll | 170336 imgmng.dll | | * mozilla integration is rather rough, partly due to a necko bug | (possibly fixed by darin's recent async changes) and partly | due to the lack of active, interested maintainers. | | * animated gifs and flash (and possibly svg in the future) cover | much of the feature set of mng. jng is a bit more interesting, | but not in ways that most people will care about. | | * the formats are little used in the wild. | | * the formats are not w3c recommended. | While I agree that the sizes had to be worked on, quite some of those “reasons” are BS, to say the least. For one, please, let’s take out PNG transparency support, CSS3 support and half of CSS2 — everyone develops under Internet Explorer anyway. It all went against the wish of at least 500 bugzilla voters and without a real notice, Pavlov chimed in with something like “Hi, I removed it from the trunk. Bye.” and never came back for more than a month. Decent reasons and well-thought filesize requirements (again though, what /is/ 120KiBs of a library these days?) were not stated for an unforgiveably long time. == Readworthies == [1] http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280 [2] http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574 A good point. I don’t have comments on the second part, it was interesting to read, too, and had good points. -- R.

Delirium wrote: BladeEnc has, as far as I can remember. You’re most possibly right about the decoders.

Hello Ralesk, Thursday, June 24, 2004, 8:42:42 PM, you wrote: ... BladeEnc suxxs anyways: http://breakpoint.untergrund.net/miscencode.php ,) SCNR, Olaf

Timwi wrote: Our content license requires that we provide materials in editable form. That means we expect people to create, as well as consume, these materials; indeed we've built the whole project around people like us coming to visit and contribute material, rather than a central controlling entity producing materials itself that visitors merely consume. Formats that can't be encoded aren't really fitting with that. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 00:43:50 +0200, Peter Gervai wrote: Not quite true. You cannot create *LZW compressed* GIFs without paying a royalty. There was a library floating around that would create GIFs that do not use LZW compression yet can be decoded by any standards-compliant GIF decoder (the compression was not as good, though). But that's marginal. Cheers, Philip

On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 11:51:05AM -0500, Delirium wrote: Thank you for this correction! I haven't followed the dates thoroughly, and it seems that GIFs indeed have no further patent problems. Still I'd prefer PNG and JPEG instead of GIF, but that's completely a matter of taste from now on. The rest of the topic probably still valid though as most video codecs have not expired patents (unless they expired in the meantime and me being ignorant again). Thanks, Peter

why don't we have a conversion tool that converts all the uploaded gif's to mng?. mng is the animated version of png, and it should be supported in browsers soon, the mozilla/firefox extension is here: http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/mngsupport. I think outruling gif's is harsh, unless we provide them with tools to convert what they have into something more usable, i.e. on the image page have a pointer to tools that conver gif's to mng or a series of png's. On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 15:36:44 -0400, Fennec Foxen <fennec(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Adon Metcalfe <flonejek(a)gmail.com> HTML Mail Perth Australia Additional Information: Last Name: Metcalfe First Name: Adon Blog: adonmetcalfe.blogspot.com

I see, oops :) On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 16:09:24 -0400, Fennec Foxen <fennec(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Adon Metcalfe mailto:flonejek@gmail.com HTML Mail Perth Australia Additional Information: Last Name: Metcalfe First Name: Adon Blog: adonmetcalfe.blogspot.com

Adon Metcalfe wrote: Simple answer: why bother? GIF: supported by all graphical browsers made within the last 15 years; no patent issues after 7 July this year; wide variety of creation tools available MNG: native support in Konqueror, plugins available for other browsers, removed from Mozilla due to size & politics; advantages include different compression levels, colour depths, forms of animation (last time I looked MNG even included interaction, like a cross between an imagemap and a Flash movie!) - NONE of which could be spontaneously created by a conversion tool. I think outruling GIFs is probably unnecessary if there are genuinely no patent issues. However, a further point to consider is whether we *want* animated images anyway (as Fennec says, the only advantage of GIFs). As soon as you print out the article, for instance, such an image is likely to become less than useless. That's not to say that there are no cases where animation is useful, but I personally "de-animated" an image, because the movement was more annoying than it was useful - I just replaced growing lines with arrows; it's now http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fresnel.png if you're curious. So, in the majority of cases, it's best to encourage people to save straight to PNG (I don't think conversion will very often be an issue, since the majority of tools that can create GIFs can probably create PNGs by now). If people really can't, we should let them just upload GIFs, I guess. -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]