[Foundation-l] Format Conversion

[Erik Moeller]

On 1/20/08, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> As an educational non-profit we can tolerate the short term costs in
> order to obtain the long term benefits, and as a top ten website these
> costs are low.

Therein lies the rub -- is the cost low or not? It's worth noting that
video on the web was viable for millions of users long before YouTube
-- the YouTube success story is not one of bandwidth, but of
usability. Before Flash players became widespread, playing video on
the web was a constant hassle: one would struggle with Real Player,
Quicktime, Windows Media Player, etc., and an additional number of
specialized plugins, all of course proprietary.

Whether one believe's Adobe's numbers of 98%+ adoption of Flash in
"mature markets" (as opposed to 84.6% for Java) [1], YouTube and its
clones made it ridiculously easy for millions of people to view video
on the web who couldn't before. The fact that terabytes of video based
educational content have become readily available as a result is an
unquestionably good thing.

My fear is that by locking ourselves into Ogg Theora only, we are
replicating the pre-YouTube experience of video that may or may not
work, may or may not require installation of additional plugins, etc.
Even on my fast Ubuntu system, the Java player takes about 10 seconds
to first initialize, which is frankly painful. I suspect that the only
effect a completely purist stance will have is simply that people will
go elsewhere for video educational content. One should not confuse
Wikipedia's power as a text-based medium with a universal lever that
we can use to get anything that we want.

If Ogg Theora is the future, then choosing parallel distribution now
on a site that is not a significant source of video educational
content will have no negative impact. And if it isn't, then surely,
inconveniencing the people trying to access the little video
educational content that we have is not the way to change that.
Without easy & immediate playback ability on the vast majority of
systems, it seems unlikely to me that we'll ever grow into a
significant repository of user-contributed video educational resources
in the first place.

My worst case scenario is that in the belief of doing something good
for the world -- trying to lead towards greater freedom in
distribution and authoring of content -- we'll actually achieve the
opposite: lead people to repositories and archives that are much less
principled and whose operators would never even conceive having a
debate like this one.

That doesn't mean that I believe the case for parallel distribution is
unassailable. I do believe, however, that mandating a Foundation rule
against it would be premature.

[1] http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate