On 03/19/2012 06:24 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
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
The point about mobile is very true and its very very difficult to
debase entrenched formats, especially when its tied up in hardware
support. And of course the Kaltura HTML5 library used in TMH has a lot
of iPad and Android H.264 support code in there for all the commercial
usage of the library, so it would not be a technical challenge to
support it.
But I think we should get our existing TMH out the door exclusively
supporting WebM and Ogg. We and can revisit adding support for other
formats after that. High on that list is also mp3 support which would
have similar benefits for audio versions of articles and mobile hardware
support audio playback.
If people felt it was important, By the end of the year we could have
javascript based webm decoders for supporting WebM in IE10 ( in case
people never saw this: https://github.com/bemasc/Broadway ) But of
course this could be seen as <insert your favourite misguided good
efforts analogy here>. i.e maybe efforts are better focused on tools
streamlining video contribution process.
Maybe we focus on a way to upload h.264 videos from mobile. Of course
doing mobile h.264 uploads correctly would ideally include making source
content available, for maximising re-usability of content, without the
quality loss in multiple encoding passes, so in effect running up
against the very principal that governs the Wikimedia projects to make
content a freely reusable resources.
I think Mozilla adding /desktop/ h.264 support may hurt free formats. On
desktop they already have strong market share, and right now many
companies actually request including WebM in their encoding profiles (
on kaltura ) but that of course would not be true if the Mozilla
supports h.264 on desktop, and it would make it harder for google chrome
to follow through on their promise to only support WebM ( if they still
plan on doing that ).
For mobile it makes sense, Mozilla has no market share there and they
have to be attractive to device manufactures create a solid mobile user
experience, fit within device battery life expectations etc. And on
mobile there is no fall back to flash if the site can't afford to encode
all their content into free formats and multiple h.264 profiles. And
they can't afford that on a that browser / platform that people have to
generality /choose /to install and use.
If they support h.264 on desktop it will be a big set back for free
formats, because there won't be any incentive for the vast majority of
pragmatic sites to support webm.
--michael
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
