On Tue, Apr 8, 2025 at 5:37 PM p858snake <[email protected]> wrote:

> One of the big issues with V2C is that it doesn't attempt to retry which
> causes a lot of the tasks to be filed:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T380982
>

*nod* Note that we can probably also improve the API uploader's handling of
stash publishing to greatly reduce the number of errors -- I'm going to see
what I can do this week while poking at misc patches, and then schedule
some more fixes for my maintenance/tech debt time. It looks like the most
common problem is a database timeout during assembly and publishing of the
final file, which can likely be resolved by keeping the transaction clean
and allowing the load balancer to shut down connections cleanly during
assembly. (We had similar problems on the transcoder system, which runs in
MediaWiki's job queue so connects to databases the same way.)

There is also a task about Coreifying/Extensionifing V2C so its more
> closely intregrated: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T353659
>

I do hope we can push forward on some work here, either adapting
conversions or directly allowing upload. "Big" feature work will require
some dev time and will have to wait its turn with other projects; "small"
fixes could happen quickly if we can work out the administrivia.

Personally I would recommend not hiding or destroying source files as
video2commons does, as this reduces visual quality and, when done at the
wrong bitrate, can drastically damage the video. If we're not legally
required to avoid distributing an original file, we probably should allow
the uploads directly on general principle. I have to warn that a conversion
that doesn't publish the original MP4 file as the actual, readable upload
file would require development time; simply enabling MP4 uploads is
something we could do at any time (with Legal's permission) by flipping a
config switch.

Either way will require double-checking with legal, and getting Commons to
fully revert the 2014 MP4 RfC which resolved that we would not support MP4
uploads, downloads, or conversion. (A 2019 RfC with much less participation
apparently said it was ok to convert but continues to forbid downloads.
Before implementing anything, conversion, upload, or download, we need to
pass it through Legal to ensure that *decoding* and *distributing* H.264
files for free doesn't cause us any problems, and that MPEG-4 Visual and
AAC and AC3 audio codecs are clean as well. Note that some MP4 files
contain HEVC codec which is different from H.264 and may have different
legal issues still; we may still have to be able to distinguish them on
upload and only handle allowed ones.)

-- brooke
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