On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Michael Dalemdale@wikimedia.org wrote:
Look back 2 years and you can see the xiph communities blog posts and conversations with Mozilla. It was not a given that Firefox would ship with ogg theora baseline video support (they took some convening and had to do some thinking about it, a big site like wikipedia exclusively using the free formats technology probably helped their decision). Originally the xiph/annodex community built the liboggplay library as an extension. This later became the basis for the library that powers firefox ogg theora video today. Likewise we are putting features into firefogg that we eventually hope will be supported by browsers natively. Also in theory we could put a thin bittorrent client into java Cortado to support IE users as well.
If watching video on Wikipedia requires bittorrent, most corporate environments are going to be locked out. If a bittorrent client is loaded by default for the videos, most corporate environments are going to blacklist wikipedia's java apps.
I'm not saying p2p distributed video is a bad idea, and the Wikimedia foundation may not care about how corporate environments react; however, I think it is a bad idea to either force users to use a p2p client, or make them opt-out.
Ignoring corporate clients... firing up a p2p client on end-user's systems could cause serious issues for some. What if I'm browsing on a 3g network, or a satellite connection where my bandwidth is metered?
Maybe this is something that could be delivered via a gadget and enabled in user preferences?
V/r,
Ryan Lane