[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Video codecs and mobile

[David Gerard]

This is a drastic policy change that affects all projects, and so
needs wider discussion than just wikitech-l.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
Date: 20 March 2012 01:24
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Video codecs and mobile
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>


As some may know, we've restricted videos on Wikimedia sites to the
freely-licensed Ogg Theora codec for some years, with some intention to
support other non-patent-encumbered formats like WebM.

One of our partners in pushing for free formats was Mozilla; Fire fox's
HTML5 video supports only Theora and WebM.

The prime competing format, H.264, has potential patent issues - like other
MPEG standards there's a patent pool and certain licensing rules. It's also
nearly got an exclusive choke hold on mobile - so much so that Mozilla is
considering ways to adopt H.264 support to avoid being left behind:

http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/03/18/video-user-experience-and-our-mission/

Is it time for us to think about H.264 encoding on our own videos?

Right now users of millions of mobile phones and tablets have no access to
our audio and video content, and our old desktop fallback of using a Java
applet is unavailable.

In theory we can produce a configuration with TimedMediaHandler to produce
both H.264 and Theora/WebM transcodes, bringing Commons media to life for
mobile users and Apple and Microsoft browser users.

What do we think about this? What are the pros and cons?

-- brion
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