On 03/20/2012 08:06 PM, Ian Baker wrote:
An argument can be made that our lack of h.264 support will drive WebM adoption, but the mechanism there isn't clear to me. While we're big, we aren't much of a player in the streaming video space right now. It seems like we're facing a classic chicken-and-egg problem: without a broadly supported codec, how do we collect and distribute videos, and without lots of videos, how do we influence the codec market? Note that YouTube is still pushing lots of h.264.
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. The biggest obstacle, however, I think is that people aren't used to work creatively with a video camcorder, not the way they work with a still camera, taking events from different angles, in different light, with different aperture or focus. It might be that video requires more specialization, including script-writing and sound editing, and that we should hope for a few specialized, highly productive contributors of video (like that German WikiTV project, or a team driving around capturing streets of every local town), rather than the everybody-can-contribute approach we have taken to still photography and text editing. 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. -- Lars Aronsson (l...@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
