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

[Andrew Lih]

Great post Manuel, and I wholeheartedly agree, including the final
recommendation. I, instead, voted for full MP4 support on the RfC to draw
the center of gravity towards accepting MP4, but I would be happy even with
a partial solution.

Some points:

1. The video project in English Wikipedia is:
[[Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wiki_Makes_Video]] We certainly welcome more than
just English Wikipedians there! We've had several university classes use
this, and I think a pretty good set of example videos and guidelines
including many videos shot by journalism and media studies students:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wiki_Makes_Video

2. I talked recently with the Mozilla Popcorn folks, and they seem to have
the best OSS, online video editing system today with Popcorn Maker. You can
actually paste in URLs of Commons video and start splicing them together.
Just make sure to use an Ogg/WebM friendly browser. I encourage you to try
it out.

https://popcorn.webmaker.org/

They said they would be thrilled if Popcorn became part of the editing
solution for Wikimedia. One problem is that they right now only manage an
EDL of edits, so embedding an edited video together requires an online
Javascript environment -- there is no provision for re-compressing and
outputting the video to a standalone Ogg or WebM file. But this is OSS so
adding this functionality should be possible with the right resources.

3. Perhaps we should do several sessions at Wikimedia in succession,
including a workshop on how to shoot and make video? I teach video shooting
and editing to students each year, so this would be quite an easy thing for
me to pitch in on.

-Andrew





On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 6:54 AM, Manuel Schneider <
manuel.schneider at wikimedia.ch> wrote:

> Hi Fabrice,
>
> interesting question!
>
> I'd like to remind of a discussion we had at last year's Wikimania in
> Hong Kong concerning tools for the video community.
>
> Yet we do not really have a video community but scattered small groups
> or individuals doing some work. I try to coordinate this in the
> german-speaking world and we do this via Wikipedia, then there are
> people in the Czech Republic doing videos on national parks, Andrew did
> some great stuff in the US, there is a british initiative as well. We
> all face similar challenges. One things - which is off-topic here - is
> that I have in mind to connect these groups to an internationl video
> community, maybe by having a WikiVideo (or whatever the name might be)
> project.
>
> But back to the RfC: One of the challenges is that we need a solution for
>
> * storing the raw video material allowing people to re-use, re-edit
> etc., also most volunteers don't have the storage capacity to store all
> their raw material
>
> * collaborative editing - hard to do technically and it mostly implies
> that raw material is being shared - hard for people that can meet each
> other as these files are big, fast storage is needed etc. and it is even
> harder for people working online
>
> * upload of high-quality, finished video projects is a pain. They mostly
> have more than 1 GB, you need to have another server to upload and share
> it, make a bug report, find a server admin who downloads and imports it
> etc.
>
> My idea which we talked about briefly at Wikimania was a server where
> people could upload there raw material, it gets transcoded into smaller
> "proxy clips" everyone can easily download, edit and then upload the EDL
> (edit decision list = video editing project file, which just holds the
> operations). The server would then use the EDL on the raw material
> stored there and render the final video. The upload process can then be
> automated between this server and Commons.
>
> The reason this idea was dismissed is the core of this RfC: patent
> trolling etc. on H.264 codecs etc. which we would need to allow as raw
> material.
>
> So my take on this topic is a compromise:
>
> * allow MP4 / H.264 as a source codec
>
> * deliver everything in WebM / Ogg Theora (or other free codecs)
>
> Especially with WebM I see no reason why people really need H.264. Ogg
> Theora is somewhat exotic but WebM isn't.
> And once we have solved the legal problem around this RfC nothing is
> stoping us to implement the video editing server, right?
>
>
> /Manuel
> --
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