[Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] YouTube and Creative Commons

[Brion Vibber]

(I'm not sure offhand if I'm set up to cross-post to Foundation-l; if this
doesn't make it, somebody please CC a mention if necessary. Thanks!)

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 4:42 PM, aude <aude.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

> Aside from the very real privacy issue, YouTube videos can disappear at any
> time.  I would much rather we host them on Commons.
>
> A youtube2commons script is pretty easy to implement, but the big hindrance
> is the 100 MB upload limit on Commons.  What are the plans (if any) to
> increase this? or help facilitate us (e.g. via the api, from the
> toolserver,
> ...) in uploading video and files that exceed the limit?
>

There's been some ongoing work on TimedMediaHandler extension which will
replace the older OggHandler (this provides the nicer video player we've got
hacked in on Commons, and some automatic transcoding for different
resolutions in the free Theora & WebM formats). This still needs a little
more work, and probably some improvements on the actual transcoding
management and such, but this will help a bit in supporting larger files (eg
by transcoding high-res files to lower-res they're more easily viewable).
This isn't ready to go just yet though, and there's still the issue of
actually uploading the files.

Basic uploads by URL work in theory, but I'm not sure the deployment status.
Background large-file downloads are currently disabled in the latest code
and needs to be reimplemented if that's to be used.

For straight uploads, regular uploads of large files are a bit problematic
in general (they hit memory limits and such and have to make it through
caching proxies and whatnot), but there's also been some new work on
improved chunked uploads for FireFogg (and perhaps for general modern
browsers that can do fancier uploads). Michael Dale can probably give some
updates on this, but it'll be a bit yet before it's ready to go.

-- brion