The current direction is to encourage in-browser client
side
transcoding. This offloads the costs of server side transcoding
and
maximizes quality letting us supply the transcode
settings for
generating theora files from the HD or DV source. Instead of
users
uploading intermediary format at low bandwidth &
arbitrary
encode
quality settings.
Why can we not do server-side
transcoding to derive a few files
(ie 3 levels of quality, plus an animated gif thumbnail...?) akin
to Archive.org?
This seems to work nicely for them (and me, when I used it).
Simply upload your file, and it automatically transcodes the file
into the appropriate derivative files. This is certainly a lot
easier than asking the user to do it (most have no sweet clue,
and even experienced users are in over their head), and ensures
that the derived files have a minimal level of quality (ie no
transoding mistakes, which is easy to do if you don't know what
you're doing), saves the user time and energy, and also automates
a repetitive task. If we're asking users to upload several sizes
of a video because we can't "thumbnail" while streaming it then
instead of making them transcode it a bunch of times so there are
a few sizes of the file, WMF servers can do it.
Incidentally,
archive.org required me to transfer the file via
FTP, which would also be /very/ nice to allow on WMF servers.
Cheers,
Mike
----
Mike.lifeguard
mikelifeguard(a)fastmail.fm