On 7/31/09 6:51 PM, Michael Dale wrote:
Want to point out the working prototype of the Wiki@home extension. Presently it focuses on a system for transcoding uploaded media to free formats, but will also be used for "flattening sequences" and maybe other things in the future ;)
Client-side rendering does make sense to me when integrated into the upload and sequencer processes; you've got all the source data you need and local CPU time to kill while you're shuffling the bits around on the wire.
But I haven't yet seen any evidence that a distributed rendering network will ever be required for us, or that it would be worth the hassle of developing and maintaining it.
We're not YouTube, and don't intend to be; we don't accept everybody's random vacation videos, funny cat tricks, or rips from Cartoon Network... Between our licensing requirements and our limited scope -- educational and reference materials -- I think we can reasonably expect that our volume of video will always be *extremely* small compared to general video-sharing sites.
We don't actually *want* everyone's blurry cell-phone vacation videos of famous buildings (though we might want blurry cell-phone videos of *historical events*, as with the occasional bit of interesting news footage).
Shooting professional-quality video suitable for Wikimedia use is probably two orders of magnitude harder than shooting attractive, useful still photos. Even if we make major pushes on the video front, I don't think we'll ever have the kind of mass volume that would require a distributed encoding network.
-- brion