[Wikimedia-l] RfC: Should we support MP4 Video on our sites?

[Fabrice Florin]

Greetings!

The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team (1) seeks your guidance on a proposal to support the MP4 video format. As you know, this digital video standard is used widely around the world to record, edit and watch videos on mobile phones, desktop computers and home video devices. It is also known as H.264/MPEG-4 or AVC. (2)

Supporting the MP4 format would make it much easier for our users to view and contribute video on Wikimedia projects -- and video files could be offered in dual formats on our sites, so we could continue to support current open formats (WebM and Ogg Theora). 

However, MP4 is a patent-encumbered format, and using a proprietary format would be a departure from our current practice of only supporting open formats on our sites -- even though the licenses appear to have acceptable legal terms, with only a small fee required. 

We would appreciate your guidance on whether or not we should support MP4 on our sites. The Request for Comments presents views both in favor and against MP4 support, based on opinions we’ve heard in our discussions with community and team members. 

What do you think? We would be grateful for your comments here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video

All users are welcome to participate, whether you are active on Commons, Wikipedia, other Wikimedia project -- or any site that uses content from our free media repository.

We also invite you to join our Office Hours Chat on IRC this Thursday, January 16, at 19:00 UTC, if you would like to discuss this project with our team and other community members:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours

We look forward to a constructive discussion with you, so we can make a more informed decision together about this important question.

All the best,



Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Multimedia
Wikimedia Foundation


(1) Multimedia Team Hub:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia


(2) About MP4:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4