[Foundation-l] We should permit Flash video playback

[Ben McIlwain]

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Erik Moeller wrote:

> We must achieve the same ease of use in Wikimedia projects. In my
> opinion, inconveniencing users is the worst possible way to raise
> awareness of free content & free software. I therefore propose that
> 1) we immediately begin serious discussions with the Internet Archive
> about hosting some or all of our video content on their servers;

Hell no!  Why should we farm out hosting to other sites?  It just makes
no sense.  We don't have any storage or bandwidth issues on our end, so
why give up control and our strong protection of free content?
Archive.org does NOT have the same copyleft stance that we do, not by a
long shot.

> 2) All uploaded videos should be transcoded to at least Ogg Theora & a
> Flash-compatible codec.

Absolutely unacceptable.  We cannot use non-free file formats.  We will
continue to use Ogg Theora and we will NOT use Flash.

> 3) we add video support to MediaWiki that will, as intelligently as
> possible, fall back to any of the following methods
> - embedded open source Flash player
> - Java player
> - VLC plugin
> - (in the future) <video> support.

Where have you been?  We already have fallback methods in place for
displaying videos on WMF servers that work for the majority of readers.
 If we put a bit more effort into improving this system we will have a
very robust way of displaying videos to readers that does not violate
our core mission.
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