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

[Samuel Klein]

We should do this (reencode all major formats to ogg).   It would
absolutely make more educational material available to commons.

We can make the service available at a reasonable rate now without
worrying about what happens when thousands of uploaders use it every
day, and deal with issues as they arise.  As for legal concerns,
Dailymotion is managing bulk conversion just fine. We can ask them if
they have to jump through any hoops.

SJ

On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 1:25 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
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