Please. Although WebM is a promising format, it's not available yet. The Java fallback is a solution even worse than just using Fash, so if we want to get with this century, I believe we have to hold our noses and adopt a modern format.
On Monday, March 19, 2012, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
As some may know, we've restricted videos on Wikimedia sites to the freely-licensed Ogg Theora codec for some years, with some intention to support other non-patent-encumbered formats like WebM.
One of our partners in pushing for free formats was Mozilla; Fire fox's HTML5 video supports only Theora and WebM.
The prime competing format, H.264, has potential patent issues - like
other
MPEG standards there's a patent pool and certain licensing rules. It's
also
nearly got an exclusive choke hold on mobile - so much so that Mozilla is considering ways to adopt H.264 support to avoid being left behind:
http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/03/18/video-user-experience-and-our-miss...
Is it time for us to think about H.264 encoding on our own videos?
Right now users of millions of mobile phones and tablets have no access to our audio and video content, and our old desktop fallback of using a Java applet is unavailable.
In theory we can produce a configuration with TimedMediaHandler to produce both H.264 and Theora/WebM transcodes, bringing Commons media to life for mobile users and Apple and Microsoft browser users.
What do we think about this? What are the pros and cons?
-- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l