As Brion points out, we get much better coverage. I enabled h.264
locally and ran though a set of Android , iOS and desktop browsers I had
available at the time:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TimedMediaHandler/Platform_testing
Pro h.264:
* No one is proposing turning "off" webm, an ideological commitment to
support free access with free platforms in royalty free formats, does
not necessarily require you exclude derivation to proprietary formats.
* We already are not "ideologically pure"
** We submit to the apple store terms of service, we build outputs
with non-freedom iOS tool chain etc.
** We write custom code / work arounds to support proprietary non
web-standard browsers.
* There is little to no chance of Apple adding "googles" codec support
to their platform.
* We could ingest h.264 making letting the commons store source material
in its originally source captured format. This is important for years
down the road we have the highest quality possible.
* Chicken and egg, for companies like apple to care about wikimedia webm
only support, wikimedia would need lots of video, as long as we don't
support h.264 our platform discourages wide use video on articles.
Pro Webm:
* Royalty free purity in /most/ of what wikimedia distributes.
* We could in theory add software playback of webm to our iOS and
android app.
* Reduced storage costs ( marginal, vs public good of access )
* Reduced licence costs for an h.264 encoder on our two transcoding
boxes ( very marginal )
* Risk that mpeg-la adds distribution costs for free online distribution
in the future. Low risk, and we could always "turn it off"
--michael
On 12/12/2012 11:26 AM, Luke Welling wrote:
FirefoxOS/Boot2Gecko phones presumably also support Ogg Theora
and WebM formats, but they're not really a market share yet and may never
be in the developed world.
Without trying to downplay the importance of ideological purity, keep in
mind that Mozilla, who have largely the same ideology on the matter have
conceded defeat on the practical side of it after investing significant
effort.
Eg http://appleinsider.
com/articles/12/03/14/mozilla_considers_h264_video_support_after_googles_vp8_fails_to_gain_traction
With Google unwilling to commit the battle was winnable.
There is not an ideologically pure answer that is compatible with the goal
of taking video content and disseminating it effectively and globally. The
conversation needs to be framed as what shade of grey is an acceptable
compromise.
Luke Welling
On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Antoine Musso <hashar+...@free.fr> wrote:
Le 12/12/12 00:15, Erik Moeller a écrit :
Since there are multiple potential paths for changing the policy
(keeping things ideologically pure, allowing conversion on ingestion,
allowing h.264 but only for mobile, allowing h.264 for all devices,
etc.), and since these issues are pretty contentious, it seems like a
good candidate for an RFC which'll help determine if there's an
obvious consensus path forward.
Could we host h.264 videos and related transcoders in a country that
does not recognize software patents?
Hints:
- I am not a lawyer
- WMF has server in Netherlands, EU.
--
Antoine "hashar" Musso
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