[Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

[David Gerard]

2009/6/7 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:

> I think there are two issues for a proprietary -> non-proprietary converter:
> 1. The conversion software itself must be FLOSS.
> 2. The format being converted must have an open specification (Flash being a
> good example of one that might be allowed to be converted).


The first is easy: ffmpeg. It converts pretty much anything to pretty
much anything. This is what I mean when I say that the technical side
of such a thing would verge on the trivial. (Modulo a sufficiently
CPU-endowed box for transcoding.)

The second - if ffmpeg have worked out the format, it's hardly any
sort of secret any more.

I think it's something that would be worth doing to get more
educational material into free formats and in a repository (Commons)
that could spread them to the world, even if they did start in an
encumbered format.


- d.