Hi Faidon,
Thanks for reaching out to us about this opportunity.
I can’t speak to the future of Cortado, and defer to folks with more technical expertise
to discuss its long-term potential.
But at this point in time, I would welcome any practical solution that can enable video
playback for over 100 million users who now cannot view videos on our sites.
According to Brian, we already have Cortado up and running, and it can support video
playback for about 80% of people who use Safari or IE on desktop machines. That is
significant, even if it’s not the ideal long-term solution.
So I would recommend that we spend the couple hundred dollars required for the
"signed" flag to work in modern browsers. It’s a small price to pay for enabling
videos on our sites for these users, even if we switch to another solution down the line.
What do others think?
Fabrice
On Jun 19, 2014, at 9:20 AM, Faidon Liambotis <faidon(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi folks,
Brian Wolff (Cc'ed) requested a few days ago for Wikimedia to sign the
Cortado Java applet that we serve as a fallback to play video on
browsers that do not support Ogg video. That's RT #7695.
From Brian's request: "Java has changed their default security settings
so that unsigned java applets (and even signed applets missing
permissions attribute) generally don't run. In order to make this
fallback work, we should sign the java applet."
A non-EV code-signing certificate costs something between $200-$500 per
year but before we go ahead and consider making this expense, I'd like
to open the discussion about Cortado's future.
I know Brion Vibber (also Cc'ed) has made a significant effort on
implelementing Ogg/Ogv decoding functionality in Javascript and Flash
with an end-goal of replacing Cortado, among others. We also had an
impromptu discussion with Brion and a few others in Zurich
(unfortunately with noone from multimedia, though), during which it was
widely agreed that Java applets provide a very poor user experience in
the modern web landscape.
What's the multimedia team's & community's opinion on that? Do you have
any plans regarding Cortado and/or ogv.js? Do you think we should invest
further into Cortado?
Thanks,
Faidon
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