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

[Tim Starling]

THURNER rupert wrote:
> i was wondering how one could check that, and i noticed that i did not know,
> out of the top of my head, a single article including a video.  so i checked
> commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Video.
> 
> and, surprise, no sound on ubuntu intrepid (mine at least). e.g.
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:AK_drum_performance.ogg. the ogg
> itself plays with sound, there is just no easy possibility in wikipedia to
> play it that way as the java player insists to come up, and does not work as
> expected. 

After you click the play button, click the "more" link below the player. A
box will pop up giving you other player option and a link to download the
file. Fixing Java is probably your own responsibility if you want to run a
beta distro. It works just fine for me on hardy. But feel free to file a
bug report.

> also, i had to look for a video with sound, because the videos are
> not marked if they are with or without sound.

On the description page, there is a type description which tells you
whether the file has sound or not. For example, with sound:

(Ogg multiplexed audio/video file, Theora/Vorbis, length 6.0s, 320×240
pixels, 2.1Mbps overall)

Without sound:

(Ogg Theora video file, length 3m54s, 160×120 pixels, 178kbps)

Unfortunately many silent videos have an empty Vorbis soundtrack,
unnecessarily bloating the size of the file. I'm not aware of any
user-friendly tool for fixing this, maybe Greg knows one.

> maybe we should start an initiative to include all these videos to some
> articles to get more feedback? or add an easy "feedback" link prominently
> going to some kind of otrs?

Please do not submit bug reports or feature requests to OTRS. Use
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/

-- Tim Starling