[Foundation-l] Freedom, standards, and file formats

[geni]

2008/9/28 Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org>:
> mboverload wrote:
>> Just a general response:
>>
>> Wikipedia, being one of the top 10 websites on Earth, has enormous
>> power.  People are not going to go to a Wikipedia page and see a video
>> and not want to play it.  "A highly trustworthy site is using a video
>> format that I can't view.  I'll just give up".
>>
>> No, they are going to follow the link "If you can't see this video
>> click here" and install the viewer.  You just then need to get some
>> video into some mainstream articles.  Wikipedia then has just
>> single-handily expanded the install base for Theora, and it's down the
>> slippery slope to widespread adoption.
>
> Do we have any evidence to support this?

How do you think the various current things used became popular?

I doubt we could pick it up in download numbers. Java is fairly
widespread already and VLC is already at over 81 million downloads.
Might be able to find something with ffmpeg2theora but we don't have
that much video content yet.


-- 
geni