Hay, thanks!

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.

2014-11-04 15:32 GMT+01:00 Hay (Husky) huskyr@gmail.com:

This is a wonderful idea, but it's extremely hard to really 'fix' this problem. Writing the spec, the tools, etcetera is not the hard part. The hard part is getting everyone convinced they should be using MOX instead of MP4/MOV/Whatever. This has been tried many times before, but the video industry is pretty conservative and is used to stick to battle-tested tools they have been using for years. Just think about how much effort it takes Apple, a multi-billion dollar company, to convert the industry from Final Cut Pro 7 to FCP X!

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'.

But then again, i really like to be proved wrong on this one :)

-- Hay

On Tue, Nov 4, 2014 at 12:17 PM, Sebastiaan ter Burg terburg@wikimedia.nl wrote:

...

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), but I'm not sure if this initiative could fill the gap we experience in sharing high quality footage. What do you think?

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---

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while it doesn't fix the underlying problem (missing free high quality codec) it fixes the practical problem for us exchanging high quality footage for collaborative editing and re-use:

The video editing server.

See the specs: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiTV/Schnittserver/Specification

Hopefully Dan, a kdenlive / MLT developer gets his offer approved by the university of Lüneburg so it can be implemented in the next weeks (bidding ended on November 4th).

Interesting. This is the first time I've seen that page.

Part of it confuses me a little:

"Because all online video formats utilise lossy compression, published videos cannot be edited further to correct or update them, and they cannot be re-used by others for different projects – unless one is willing to accept a dramatic degradation of quality. Making original quality raw footage available for re-use is still a very rare and laudable exception...Because of the community consensus to prefer no MP4 support, storing raw footage within the Wikiverse is not possible. Wikimedia Commons permits uploading of video files only in the patent-free formats WebM/VP8 and Ogg/Theora."

This is kind of confusing, as MP4 is usually used in lossy mode (Just like webm), so neither is exactly ideal for video editing. Both WebM/VP9 (Which currently cannot be uploaded for technical reasons, but there are no political objections) and MP4 support a "lossless mode", however in practice I don't think its usually used (Maybe I'm wrong. I have no idea what consumer-grade video cameras actually output. It would surprise me if it was actually lossless video).

I imagine (but have no evidence), that VP8 would be just as acceptable as MP4 for this use case if the quality option was cranked way up. (OTOH the first generation of the video content would be in theory best, but perhaps the difference is negligible...)

--bawolff