On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 12:35 AM, Tyler Romeo tylerromeo@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Nov 1, 2013 at 5:41 PM, Matthew Flaschen <mflaschen@wikimedia.org
wrote:
So this does not change anything in my view.
Actually it changes something pretty important. This means that now all major browsers will have H.264 support. MediaWiki may not be able to encode its own videos in H.264, but we can still serve existing H.264 videos. So if somebody uploads an MP4 to Commons, that video can be served without having to transcode it into another less efficient format.
Just serving the same bits back out that you saw uploaded isn't enough; just as with still photos we need to be able to convert formats and resize to fit appropriate bandwidth and processing limits.
As with still photos, we want to archive the highest-resolution, highest-quality source material (today that generally means pre-compressed .mp4 files at up to 1080p HD)... but for most viewers we'll actually ship a lower-resolution, lower-bitrate transcode.
Also keep in mind that the announced Cisco H.264 codec is video only; most .mp4 video files include *audio* tracks encoded in AAC, another patent-encumbered part of the MPEG-4 family. There may or may not be further announcements from Mozilla about audio codecs -- we can only wait -- but Cisco's involvement appears to be specific to WebRTC, and they claim no plans to provide a licensed AAC codec or otherwise support general .mp4 file playback.
If all this makes you want to just punch patents in the nose and run away, that's understandable...
-- brion