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

[Ted Chien]

>From my knowledge when I was working as an engineer in the multimedia
software company back in 2006, if there's no transcoding to MP* formats, no
patent fee is required. So if you upload MP4 files then download them
without any transcoding it should be fine (correct me if I'm wrong). We'd
only been charged by MPEG LA for encoding the MPEG-4 video at that time.

Personally I would support to include MP4 in Wikimedia projects if no
patent fee is required, since it's already widely used in user's daily
life.

Regards,
Ted Chien
-- Sent from my HTC New One
2014/1/17 下午10:16 於 "Todd Allen" <toddmallen at gmail.com> 寫道：

> On Jan 16, 2014 11:05 PM, "Tim Starling" <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 17/01/14 01:14, Todd Allen wrote:
> > > 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).
> >
> > I don't really understand this argument. It's not like there are video
> > cameras that record directly to Theora. So presumably, most videos
> > uploaded to Commons start life as H.264 or some other proprietary
> > format, and are transcoded to Theora before they are uploaded to Commons.
> >
> > The proposal is to make it possible to upload the source file and have
> > the server do the transcode, whereas currently, the source file is
> > private and thus not distributed under a free license. Currently, if
> > you want to reuse an H.264 source file, you have to somehow contact
> > the author, beg for a copy of the file, and hope that they haven't
> > deleted it. With this proposal, if you want to reuse an H.264 file
> > without a patent license, you can just download the Theora transcode
> > from the server.
> >
> > I am having trouble thinking of a scenario where the current situation
> > would be better for reuse than the proposed situation. If you can
> > think of one, please tell me.
> >
> > -- Tim Starling
> >
> >
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>
> If the server does the transcode and ultimately makes available only a
> video file in a free format, and WMF doesn't have to pay the patent holders
> to make that happen, then I would have no objection.
>
> If, however, the nonfree format is made available for download, or WMF
> funds would be supporting a software patent, those are clear negatives.
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