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

[Tim Starling]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 8:30 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> My understanding, from a previous mailing list discussion, was that we can
> 
> Your understanding is entirely different from my own. Possibly we were
> reading different mailing lists?
> 
> My takeaway from the lists I was on was better summed by by this
> comment by Brion Vibber in response to Kaltura's video software: "We
> won't even consider touching the software itself with a hundred-foot
> pole until they can support the free environment and formats we
> require. That's a condition they're well aware of."

I was also completely opposed to any deal with Kaltura. But I'm not
opposed to on-the-fly conversion from a free archival format to a non-free
display format, and I think that's a totally different issue.

With display formats, there's no lock-in, we can drop support at any time,
and the costs may well be laughably low or zero.

If you think it's going to be expensive after 2010, then we could support
FLV/H.264 as a display format until then, and then drop it. Maybe by that
time, the Thusnelda branch will be finished, and we'll have an codec
library which is competitive with H.264 in terms of output quality. Nobody
is going to stop working on libtheora just because we start transcoding
our Theora videos to alternative formats.

A framework for transcoding into multiple formats may be useful at that
time even if we don't want to use MPEG anymore, since we might want to
start promulgating Dirac.

-- Tim Starling