Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread Milos Rancic
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 5:26 PM, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: It would be a simple matter of programming to have something that allows upload of encumbered video and audio formats and re-encode them as Ogg Theora or Ogg Vorbis. It would greatly add to how much stuff we get, as it would

Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread David Gerard
[cc'd back to wikitech-l] 2009/6/8 Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org: It's been discussed since OggHandler was invented in 2007, and I've always been in favour of it. But the code hasn't materialised, despite a Google Summer of Code project come and gone that was meant to implement a

Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread Peter Gervai
On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 17:26, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: It would be a simple matter of programming to have something that allows upload of encumbered video and audio formats and re-encode them as Ogg Theora or Ogg Vorbis. As a technical sidenote, it should be mentioned that recoding

Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread David Gerard
2009/6/8 Peter Gervai g...@grin.hu: On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 17:26, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: It would be a simple matter of programming to have something that allows upload of encumbered video and audio formats and re-encode them as Ogg Theora or Ogg Vorbis. As a technical

Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread Peter Gervai
On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 14:54, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: Well, yeah. But until cameras or phones start recording Ogg Theora natively, we're likely stuck with this. As another tidbit, I have a music player (mp3 player) which records and plays ogg (not Theora though). :-) But you're

Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread Tim Starling
Peter Gervai wrote: On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 17:26, David Gerarddger...@gmail.com wrote: It would be a simple matter of programming to have something that allows upload of encumbered video and audio formats and re-encode them as Ogg Theora or Ogg Vorbis. As a technical sidenote, it should be

[Foundation-l] UN announces free (cheap) online university

2009-06-08 Thread David Gerard
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30848 Free tuition, admission fee, testing fee. No word on freedom of materials. Anyone know more about details of this? Something we can help with? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list

Re: [Foundation-l] UN announces free (cheap) online university

2009-06-08 Thread Moushira Elamrawy
University website: http://www.uopeople.org Currently providing two academic programs; computer science track and business admin. Enrollment deadline for fall semester hasn't yet passed!! Regards, Moushira On 6/8/09, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

Re: [Foundation-l] UN announces free (cheap) online university

2009-06-08 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/6/8 Moushira Elamrawy moushi...@gmail.com: University website: http://www.uopeople.org Currently providing two academic programs; computer science track and business admin. Enrollment deadline for fall semester hasn't yet passed!! [T]he University of the People does not presently confer

Re: [Foundation-l] UN announces free (cheap) online university

2009-06-08 Thread Nathan
News article linked in the first post said they'd already enrolled over 200 students; FAQ says its capped at 300, so I imagine its reached its cap by now. Moushira wrote: Enrollment deadline for fall semester hasn't yet passed!! ~Nathan ___

Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies #2

2009-06-08 Thread Jimmy Wales
Couldn't the stats job you want run on toolserver? Peter Gervai wrote: Hello, I wasn't subscribed to this list, since I usually try to avoid the politics around. I was notified, however, that some interesting claims were made and some steps taken (again) without any discussion

Re: [Foundation-l] China Requires Censoring Software on New PCs

2009-06-08 Thread Kul Takanao Wadhwa
We have been talking about how we survived being blocked by the Chinese government during the last June 4th ban but now this is on the table. We have to see how this will now affect us. June 9, 2009 China Requires Censoring Software on New PCs By ANDREW JACOBS BEIJING — China has issued a

Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia tracks user behaviour via third party companies #2

2009-06-08 Thread Domas Mituzas
Hi! Couldn't the stats job you want run on toolserver? Really, this isn't much of foundation-l issue - we have been collecting and providing detailed article viewership statistics for over a year. People are building various applications on top of that data, like

Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread Michael Dale
I am definitely not opposed to adding in that functionality as I have mentioned in the past: see thread: http://www.mail-archive.com/wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org/msg00888.html You should take a look at the work Mike Baynton did back in summer of code 07. The issue that we have is both the

Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread Brian
I presume the WMF has a large amount of free disk space. How much? On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Michael Dale md...@wikimedia.org wrote: I am definitely not opposed to adding in that functionality as I have mentioned in the past: see thread:

Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread Brian
I don't think that's all that's needed. There will be Wikimedians scouring the Internet for all free video in all of its forms (of which there is quite a lot) and uploading it to Commons. You'll need an entire encoding farm. Hard drives are cheap, its true, but redundant storage is less cheap as a

Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread David Gerard
2009/6/8 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: I don't think that's all that's needed. There will be Wikimedians scouring the Internet for all free video in all of its forms (of which there is quite a lot) and uploading it to Commons. You'll need an entire encoding farm. Hard drives are cheap, its

Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread Michael Dale
We have done a good amount of work with archive.org to ensure that their archive is interpretable. I know from the present vantage point it does not seem helpful to have media on archive.org... but as features like the add_media_wizard get deployed it will make a lot more sense why it does not

Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread Brian
Firefogg is not a very usable solution for most users. It requires far too much sophistication. Users should be able to just upload video that they know is under a free license and then everything else happens on the backend. On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 3:57 PM, Michael Dale md...@wikimedia.org wrote:

Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread Thomas Dalton
2009/6/8 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: I presume the WMF has a large amount of free disk space. How much? Hard drives are cheap, the WMF can just buy more if that is all that is needed. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread Michael Dale
hmm.. it will be a one-two click install directly from the upload page. (if the user is using Firefox). Then it works exactly the same as the existing upload interface only it transcodes the video as it uploads Yea it would be good to support both; and yes we should simplify upload

[Foundation-l] Fwd: Digital Open seeks a few more international stewards

2009-06-08 Thread phoebe ayers
This may be of interest to some Wikimedia contributors. The Digital Open is a competition for youth (under 17) around the world to create innovative free open technology projects. There's an associated online contest that is running this summer (I'm a judge :)). The call below is for stewards to

Re: [Foundation-l] China Requires Censoring Software on New PCs

2009-06-08 Thread Nathan
Wouldn't it be nicely ironic if the Internet decided to block China? I wonder how it would play, when the Chinese government offices used to unrestricted access suddenly found themselves surfing the Chinese Intranet behind the Great Firewall blocking Chinese traffic from the rest of the world...

Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Tim Starling wrote: Some people in the community take the view that supporting proprietary standards, as an option alongside free standards, weakens the ability of the free standards to compete for mindshare and client support, and thus that it shouldn't be done. We would have to have that

Re: [Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

2009-06-08 Thread Brian
I hold the same sort of pragmatic view. In the absence of freely licensed content encoded in a free format we should accept free content in any format. I think it would take a revolution within the Foundation staff and the most vocal parts of the community (note that I did not say majority),