[Wikipedia-l] Video uploaded...

[James R. Johnson]

Why can't we simply use the avi or mpeg formats again?  Do we have to pay
someone to encode the file, or what's the deal?  Those formats for video
would get the widest reach of any file format.

James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andre Engels
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 1:19 PM
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Video uploaded...

I still protest the policies on this point. In the name of freedom, we
are enforcing a non-standard format, giving people extra problems to
just hear and see the sound files and videos on Wikipedia. Wikipedia
should be there for the normal internet user, not just for tech-savy
open-source-loving nerds.

My computer when seeing a .ogg-file, automatically assumes it's a
sound file, and thus I cannot see this movie. I know there are others
who don't even have software for .ogg-soundfiles. We are much too
strict on this point. What should bother us is not whether there are
any patents on a certain format, but whether free software exists to
play it. Where that is the case (for the most common platforms, or at
the very least for Windows and Unix), rejecting files because their
format is supposedly non-free is doing a disservice to our readers and
writers with no actual advantage to compensate for it.

Andre Engels



On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 16:04:44 +1100, Robert Graham Merkel
<robert.merkel at benambra.org> wrote:
> In the grand tradition of actually getting things done on Wikipedia,
> Wikipedian KSheka, with some assistance from myself to convert the video
> to Theora, has gone ahead and uploaded a video of an "echocardiograph
> demonstrating systolic anterior motion of the anterior leaflet of the
> mitral value", which, translated, I think means "a video of a beating
> heart with a valve that's moving wrongly"
> 
> You can see the article with the uploaded video at
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertrophic_cardiomyopathy
> 
> Now we actually *have* a video in a patent-unencumbered codec uploaded
> to Wikipedia, and the ability to make more of them (transcoding to Theora
> is pretty straightforward once you've got ffmpeg2theora installed), the
> discussion about video I posted at http://meta.wikimedia.org/Video_policy
> becomes a little more directly relevant...
> 
> >From my point of view, I'd be very interested in people's thoughts on
> what we should do to make best use of video (one thing that comes to
> mind is that we should always take a still from the video as
> illustration, but more thoughts are good)...
> 
> Oh, and has there been any progress on implementing code for an approval
> process?
> 
> --
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>                                            Robert Merkel
>                                      robert.merkel at benambra.org
>                                         http://benambra.org
> 
> "And James Hird has just gone after Robert Harvey...that's like Bambi
> attacking Bambi"
>  -- Gerard Whately, Essendon vs. St Kilda, 3/4/2004
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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