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

[Milos Rancic]

As I see that there are a number of well introduced people in this
matter, I want just to give the input from my experience (I am an
admin at the company which archives media and doing press clipping).

- For us, Flash was never an option, while WMV, MPEG (1 and 2) and
OGG/Theora are. Note that the company in which I am working has to
adapt to their customers. Simply, no one of customers wants Flash.
(BTW, MPEG 1 and 2 are useful because there are hardware encoders on
["hardware"] TV cards. WMV is useful because of the possibility to
make a very small video file.)

- There are VLC, MPlayer and similar plugins for web browsers which
allow watching video [from browsers]. It makes usage of OGG/Theora
format similar to usage of Flash ("click here to download the
plugin").

- It is already mentioned that HTML5 will have <video> tag and that
Firefox 3.1 supports it.

>From this perspective, I don't see a reason why to adopt Flash *now*.
It was an option few years ago, but there is no need for that now. If
some free software is not stable enough now (like VLC or MPlayer
plugins), it is reasonable to build a solution around that software.
We will not make anything like that (even Flash based) in the next 6
or 12 months and until that time free software may be much more
stable.

BTW, VLC is a really good piece of software (including their streaming
software VLS). Did anyone think to make contact with them? I am sure
that it would be possible to work on "the solution for Wikipedia" with
them.