[Commons-l] We should permit Flash video playback

[Erik Moeller]

On 7/20/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> By doing so we lose the ability to offer a complete record of our
> content, and and the ability to offer easy 'one stop' duplication of
> our collection for backup and other purposes.

http://download.wikimedia.org/

Image tarballs
    There are currently no image dumps available. Check back in mid-2007.

We don't seem to be doing very well on this front one way or another.
The Internet Archive _specializes_ on redundant, fail-safe archiving.
I'm sure providing easy ways to access all uploaded videos would be
much easier for them than it is for us.

> A lot of the content that Archive.org hosts would be deleted on
> commons for copyright reasons. Historically they have handled
> copyright by exception rather than proactively.

It's an _archive_. Their point is to slurp up as much material as
possible. It's wonderful that an organization with this purpose exists
which is willing to push the limits of what is permissible under
copyright law, and if we only push free content to them, rather than
adopting their criteria for inclusion, their mission in no way
denigrates ours. We could selectively whitelist some of their
collections as being acceptable for use within our projects.

> Yet some members of our development staff do not respond to emails
> about video playback support in Mediawiki.

By "some members of our development staff", do you mean Tim or Brion?
;-) Let's face it, we don't currently have the staff support to go
much beyond just keeping the sites running. As Board member I will
certainly continue to push for this to change ASAP.

> Where have you been?  :) We now have automatic in browser playback
> that works for a majority of readers without downloading anything
> additional.

We still don't support embedding video directly into articles (the
Archive has a nice implementation where the player loads in the brower
once you click the preview). What are you basing the assertion
"majority of readers" on?

> Jeez Erik. With the exception of flash we already have that.
> *Including* HTML5 <video/> support, which works in Opera.

It does? I'm using Opera 9.2, and it only shows me the Java player.
Which does work, though it initially showed me a tiny version of the
video (and the full video on reload). My experience with Java applets
has generally been very negative, with memory usage and initialization
time often being prohibitively high, and debugging for different
platforms being very difficult.

We should carefully look at the experience of the vast majority of
users who are a) on Windows, b) use Internet Explorer or the default
install of Firefox. I would also bet that most of them don't have Java
installed, but it seems hard to get numbers on that. Being able to
play video directly in the article being viewed is also highly
desirable.

> Wikimedia is in the US. How do you propose we pay the licensing fees
> for the codec patents we are using, should we be presented with a
> bill?

I think we should simply ask the current patent holders whether they
would grant us non-commercial rights to use the relevant codecs. Yes,
such rights won't trickle down to third parties, but we would offer
the Theora files and promote Theora for this reason. The right could
be time-limited, and renegotiated regularly.

If they say "No" or "Yes, but ..", we would have a very good reason to
reject those codecs. One can never be completely safe from a patent
lawsuit, of course, but that applies to any codec, whether it is
ostensibly unencumbered or not.

> If someone doesn't step forward and push for unencoumbered formats

I'm 100% in support of "pushing unencumbered formats", but not at the
expense of usability for the majority of users.

> We already have a solution that works for a lot of Windows users
> without installing anything most don't already have. (Flash isn't
> installed by default in Windows either.. but most have it. Java
> penetration isn't quite as deep, but for our readers it does
> remarkably well)

I'd love to see hard data on this. Failing any already existing data,
a large scale video survey on our projects could be a good first step.

-- 
Toward Peace, Love & Progress:
Erik

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