[Foundation-l] Donation of DVDs to Wikimedia Foundation Projects

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 1/1/07, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> There is also the comparatively minor issue of trying to convert the
> files from MPEG format to OGG or other patent-free (or compatable with
> the GFDL) formats, but I think we can find some individuals to help out
> with that on the various Wikimedia projects.  That is not the major
> issue at the moment.

Conversion is trivial. There are some technical burps related to
handling large files (right now max file size on commons is set to
~20megs) which we will need to iron out for other content.

> The costs of doing so I would guess would be rather
> substantial for bandwidth costs alone, assuming several individuals are
> all trying to download these huge files, which has been an issue raised
> in the past.

The popularity of the content is a big factor.
A short video viewed by 10,000 people will usually use more bandwidth
than a long video viewed by ten people. :)  I think in the case of
this videos, if we found people viewing more than the beginnings it
would be evidence that they were actually being used.. and that is a
good thing..

Really I think something like this is valuable for far more reasons
than the video:  if the content were freely licensed it could be
transcribed and then converted into wikiversity courseware.