On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 2:50 PM, Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Matthew Flaschen mflaschen@wikimedia.org wrote:
Did you test WebM in Android Browser 2.3+ or Chrome for Android 18+ (I think this is latest).
http://caniuse.com/webm says those support WebM, but I have not
verified.
I was able to play the WebM file of the locomotive on the front page of https://commons.wikimedia.org just now on my Nexus 7 using Chrome, so at least on very new stock Android devices, all is well. My much older Galaxy S didn't fare so well, though, so I would be willing to believe that Android devices with proper WebM support are still relatively rare. That said, the replacement rate for this hardware is frequent enough that it won't be long before my Nexus 7 is "much older".
Aha, that's good news! I'll run more thorough tests... Android 2.3 is still a majority so depending on whether this is really a 2.3 thing or a 4.0 thing we may or may not have enough coverage for Android.
I'm not sure that hardware decoding is available for WebM on many (any?) devices, so performance seems to vary even on software that understand it; Firefox on my Galaxy Nexus runs the WebM video on http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Panda very nicely but our Firefox OS test device with a much slower CPU is too choppy to watch.
Another possibility is that we could invest time in making a standalone WebM player application for iOS, Windows 8/RT, etc that we can easily direct people to install without administrative privileges. It wouldn't have hardware acceleration and it would be a poorer user experience to pop out of the browser or Wikipedia app, but it would be possible.
It's much, MUCH easier for us to flip the H.264 switch... there are ideological reasons we might not want to, but we're going to have to put the effort into making those player apps if we want all our data accessible to everyone.
-- brion