On Wed, 12 Dec 2012 11:35:40 -0800, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 12 December 2012 18:38, Michael Dale mdale@wikimedia.org wrote:
- No one is proposing turning "off" webm, an ideological commitment to
support free access with free platforms in royalty free formats, does not necessarily require you exclude derivation to proprietary formats.
This proposal is not about anything other than enhancing the shiny for owners of iOS devlces. While the devices are indisputable really lovely to use, this particular (shrinking) userbase does not constitute a group in any way lacking in access to anything we do, on any other device they own (and they do own other devices).
The only reason you can't view anything other than H.264 on iOS devices is because Apple want to promote a given severely proprietary format on their locked-down devices. This is not a reason for Wikimedia to break principle.
Mozilla is not an argument. Mozilla doing the wrong thing for directly commercial reasons is not any sort of argument for us to. It's only pressure from users that will get the companies to use unlocked formats.
- d.
Sorry, but this isn't just about iOS and wanting to lock into proprietary video formats.
Hardware decoders for WebM are still rare. I hate H.264, but right now H.264 is the one format with hardware decoders in practically every device.
And that's pretty important. Mobile devices are low power. Without native hardware decoding video playback is taxing on the CPU and has bad performance. And more importantly, it becomes a significant drain on the device's battery life. An utter sin for anyone targeting mobile.