On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 4:39 AM, Strainu<strainu10(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I've heard that wikipedia will be among the first content providers to
support the video and audio tags in html5. I'm trying to put up a
presentation about the subject for a FF3.5 release party and I would
like to find out more. Could you point me to some documents or answer
some of the questions below?
1) When will this support appear?
2) Has the code already been modified accordingly?
Stephen Bain addressed this admirably, but I thought I should add that
the support has been there for years now. We've been waiting browser
vendors to catch up.
Even prior to Opera's push for the video tag we had in-browser java
based playback of Ogg files on English Wikipedia.
3) How much time will legacy browsers be supported?
For Wikimedia legacy browser support is fairly inexpensive: They play
back the same files that the video/audio users. So legacy support can
last as long as its relevant.
For sites who have used other formats for legacy browsers, they have
the cost of maintaining another set of encodes and format royalties,
so for them there may be more incentive to drop legacy support.
There is also a question of what constitutes 'legacy': There is one
desktop browser can play our video perfectly adequately using the
HTML5 tags, but it requires a codec pack.
4) What prompted this desire to be an early adopter of
this technology?
Wikimedia has a long-standing commitment to open and unencumbered file
formats which stems back to nearly the start of the projects. The
mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is "to empower and engage people
around the world to collect and develop educational content under a
free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it
effectively and globally", and it has been the belief that people are
more empowered when they don't feel forced for compatibility reasons
to use formats they have to ask permission for and pay for.
As such, the use of encumbered video technology such as flash is not
something that would be decided lightly.
The adoption of the HTML5 tags follows naturally from this
pre-existing behavior as a way of getting media working for a larger
portion of the userbase.
5) Will other codecs except Theora be supported?
The list of file types supported today can be found here:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:File_types
Really the support just depends on the intersection of the project
requirements (as of today: free and unencumbered formats) and client
support (as of today, Ogg/Theora has the widest client compatibility
for HTML5 video).
The thumbnailing infrastructure for video currently only handles
Ogg/Theora but other formats could be easily added.
This one isn't really a technical question.