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