> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2014 12:17:43 +0100
> From: Sebastiaan ter Burg <terburg@wikimedia.nl>
> To: wikivideo-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Wikivideo-l] MOX file format
> Message-ID:
>         <CAH=K=+nsvBZB4SbPeU4cCQWGFSLErpb1qqS2FQakXB9EcCa2ng@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> any thoughts on this IndieGoGo campaign?
> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/mox-file-format/x/4029267
>
> I'm a sucker of supporting this kind of projects (I also backed the
> openshot 2 kickstarter
> <https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/421164014/openshot-video-editor-for-windows-mac-and-linux>),
> but I'm not sure if this initiative could fill the gap we experience in
> sharing high quality footage. What do you think?
>
> --
> Sebastiaan ter Burg
> *Projectleider Culturele Samenwerking*
> *Wikimedia Nederland*

From their funding page
" MOX will read and play consistently on Mac, Windows, Linux, or any other platform. This is because MOX will be an open format based on open standards"

Ha. If it was really that easy to get interopability we'd be living in the land of ogg and webm. (Arguably there may be less lock in in the pro market, but stil-open source is not interopability magic)

So the tech summary of this (afaict. Im not a video expert so correct me if im wrong) they are taking a container format aimed at pro users named mxf, which is much like tiff in that it can contain anything and hence has interopability problems as you never know whats inside. They are taking mxf making a profile of it called mox which is limitted to free codecs, and specificly codecs that a pro would want to use (lossless or high quality lossless) as an intermediary format.

The codecs are one of: Dirac, OpenEXR, DPX,PNG, and JPEG.

Dirac is an interestng choice. I suppose its chosen because it has a lossless option, but from what i understand its very slow to encode, so i wouldnt think its suitable for this usage (maybe im mistaken). The other codecs are just image codecs.

Dpx is an interesting choice given this groups goals as wikipedia describes it as "non-free SMPTE standard, 17 pages, USD 120" (although maybe that only refers to the standard. There exists free software implementations)

The audio codecs are: flac, opus and raw pcm. Flac and pcm are lossless, opus is a high quality lossy codec.

---

Im unsure what exactly the issues with sharing high quality footage are, but I assume there are three:
* file size - 1gb limit on commons (and realistically >100mb is flaky)
*social -some people worry about dumping source material on commons. I think this concern is overblown but one should not underestimate social problems
*inconvinent formats -ogg/webm is hard to convert to. Aimed at end use not intermediary use.

This could help with the third point potentially (in the far future if it becomes an industry std, which is a big "if". Open source projects fail all the time). I think there is probably more we can do on the format front. Its a complex issue, but im pretty sure not all avenues have been exhausted, or perhaps even explored.

An approach that may lead to more immediate results is something like pro-res (if unpatented) which allegedly is decodable in ffmpeg  (unpatented and decodable in ffmpeg is basically the criteria for enabling a new format on commons), and also has the benefit of existing right now

--bawolff

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