On 20 March 2012 20:02, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:
I'm not opposed to trying H.264, but I doubt it
will solve our problem,
which is that we have too few videos.
The category:Videos from Sweden (an early adopter market) is now at
110 files, which is a ridiculously small number. It has doubled each
year (30 in 2010, 52 in 2011), but that growth is too slow to reach
any significant numbers in the next 2-3 years. I don't see that lack
of H.264 playback is slowing this down, that mechanism isn't clear
to me.
I think that converting whatever comes out of my camera into
something that Commons will accept is part of the problem. This does
not imply that H.264 needs to be stored on Commons, only that
whatever is uploaded gets converted by the server rather than by
the user before upload.
Yes. That's the biggest barrier to participation. We need to be able
to ingest whatever comes out of people's cameras.
I was hoping that we would organize video
competitions, but I have
held back, because I don't see any crowd with camcorders in their
hands. Now, if we get there in 2013 or 2014, and then discontinue
H.264 playback in 2015, we could be in for a real backlash.
This is an excellent argument against making ourselves hostage to the
MPEG-LA. Giving people like that any leverage over Wikimedia strikes
me as a *spectacularly* awful idea.
(foundation-l added to cc: - changing the encumbered formats policy is
not a matter to be quietly decided over on a tech list.)
- d.