On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 5:24 AM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Is it time for us to think about H.264 encoding on our own videos?
Hello, Brion.
I think it is time for Apple to support Wikipedia videos. I suggest that we view the thing from this point of view — Apple do not run a Top-10 site, we do.
I would say that running something on Wikimedia servers which requires us to pay royalties seems incompatible to our mission. As far as I understand, that would be required for video transcoding. Same for MP3. Same was for Flash, which we did not use even though there were numerous cases when it was essential (we still cannot upload >100MB files to Commons because of that).
It's not like it is that bad. OGG/WebM are supported by most major browsers, except IE, Safari and their mobile counterparts. Even for the first two, there are codecs available.
—vvv