On 11/4/14, Sebastiaan ter Burg <terburg@wikimedia.nl> wrote:
> Hi Bawolff,
>
> for someone that's claiming not to be an expert you sure seem to know what
> you're talking about. On the sharing the high quality footage: the idea is
> not to dump it on commons, but to set up a separate server
> <https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.nl/presentation/d/1sS8WnMO6iFidEPkyNMk2gZQkuyEgRYeupI4uELS4erc/edit#slide=id.p>
> where
> we can share Wikimedia related footage (at first) with each other. For
> example: interviews with Wikipedias, b-roll shot at events, screencaptures
> of instructional videos, timelines and more of that kind of stuff. Choosing
> one codec would be the easiest at first, but if licensing would allow it it
> could be more economical to share the out of camera files. In other words:
> no use to upload ProRess422 when I shot a video in AVCHD... The AVCHD files
> will be much smaller and the edit suites I know don't have a problem
> rendering these files to a more edit-friendly format again.
>
> Any ideas how we could get an answer on the licensing question for hosting
> certain formats?
>
> Best,
>
> Sebastiaan
>

AVCHD = MP4 = H.264 (+ AC-3), so on that front we essentially have an
answer, its just not a very popular answer (In this particular group
anyways). The RFC was pretty conclusive, although there may be a
little wiggle room about converters on say the tool labs (unclear), it
seemed pretty decisive about not allowing H.264 content on Wikimedia
servers in general. Perhaps there's wiggle room on unofficial servers,
but than its not an official project.

In my comment about format's, I meant more that there's probably other
lossless formats which we could probably use, at the expense of very
large files. (Maybe anyways, it would need to be explored. I don't
really know).

Keep in mind also, that converting AVCHD -> Proless/some lossless
thing/etc -> AVCHD is going to cause quality loss, in a similar
fashion as if someone repetitively converted JPEG -> PNG -> JPEG. Of
course at this stage that's probably a minor concern. The bigger issue
is getting anything up and running.


>One of the problems we're facing with the renewed video initiative is a
>codec to share high quality footage with each other. I've emailed Apple
>several times to ask if there are any restrictions in sharing files -
>solely sharing without playback - on a public server, but they haven't
>responded yet. That's why this initiative caught my eye.

I'm not sure what grounds Apple would have to restrict sharing such
files (Unless they had you sign an actual NDA before giving you a
product that could make such a file).

Sure if they had a patent on it, they could restrict the use of
products which create, convert or play the file (Do they [or other
people] actually have a patent on any of the ProRes stuff? Anybody
know?). But I'm not sure how they would have any ground to restrict
the distribution of such files. If they somehow had a copyright claim
on the resulting file, perhaps - but that sounds absurd to me. After
all the file is created entirely by a mechanical process, while the
mechanical process might be very creative, the result is created by a
machine and thus by definition lacks creativity (Unless some
"creative" constants are copied in). IANAL.

The more likely issue, is that if the file format is patented, we
wouldn't be able to use due to internal political reasons, rather than
any external restrictions.

Hay said:
>Then there's the problem of hardware. Think about OGG/WebM: used very
>little on mobile because there's no support for hardware acceleration
>(and hence: better battery life).
>
>So, no. I don't think this initiative could fill the 'open source high
>quality video gap'.

I don't think that's really where this particular group is targeting.
A format like mox would have impractically large file sizes for mobile
(or any sort of end viewing), and hardware acceleration really doesn't
matter very much when almost no compression is being used. Work in the
high quality open source video codec space for final product video is
more centered around VP9 and Dalla AFAIK.

--bawolff

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