[Commons-l] Broken videos

[Lars Aronsson]

This past weekend, at the SXSW conference, a new initiative
was launched to "get video on Wikipedia",
http://videoonwikipedia.org/

That sounds like a great idea.

(I wasn't there, but I was told.)

But among the first videos to be uploaded since the
announcement are two that show some construction
equipment and both break my browser every time I try
to watch them. How can this be possible with a fully
updated Mozilla Firefox 3.5.8 on Ubuntu Linux?

I suppose something went wrong in the OGG encoding,
but still, browsers should not be fooled by this,
and/or Wikimedia Commons needs to make sure videos
are correctly encoded so they can be safely watched.

I have asked that these two broken videos be removed,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:6hpPowerTrowel.ogv
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:13hpBoren.ogv

We discussed for a long time why OpenOffice documents
can't be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons because the
ZIP encoding wasn't safe and could explode in the
face of the user. Well, maybe OGG isn't safe either?

Should we just ban video all together?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se