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

[Lionel Allorge]

Hi,

Todd Allen said:
...
> This proposal asks to move to a "free as in beer" model, where content will
> be free to view, but not necessarily to reuse (and with the opaque license,
> it may not even be possible to tell). We could choose to make that change,
> but it is a major change to the founding principles of what we do.  As such
> it should be discussed directly and across all projects as such a major
> change, and not backdoored through a vote that is on its surface a question
> about format support.

I agree with Todd that the support of MP4 would be loosing the freedom that is 
at the heart of the Wikimedia projects.

There is also a problem with the idea that it will allow people to directly 
upload the videos made by their camcorder. Most of the time it is a bad idea 
to upload a video without any form of editing. Most of the time you need to 
remove at least the begining and the end of a video file. It will result in 
many very bad videos.

On the contrary, we should encourage people to edit their videos with 
tutorials and to render the final edit in a free file format.

Best regards.

-- 
Lionel Allorge
April : http://www.april.org
Lune Rouge : http://www.lunerouge.org
Wikimedia France : http://wikimedia.fr