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Wikipedia's Assault On Patent-Encumbered Codecs

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 17, 2010 @08:44AM from the because-they-hate-the-march-of-progress dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign today called Let's Get Video on Wikipedia, asking people to create and post videos to Wikipedia articles. (Good, encyclopedia-style videos only!) Because all video must be in patent-free codecs (theora for now), this will make Wikipedia by far the most likely site for an average internet user to have a truly free and open video experience. The campaign seeks to 'strike a blow for freedom' against a wave of h.264 adoption in otherwise open HTML5 video implementations."

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Re:HTML5 Video by shutdown+-p+now · 2010-03-17 10:54 · Score: 4, Informative

No-one said that it is.
The point is that browser remains FOSS. If user is a FOSS purist, he doesn't install the "evil" codecs, and doesn't go to websites which only provide H.264 streams. If user is a pragmatic Linux user, he either buys the codec (freeness of browser not affected), or ignores the law and installs it from "non-US" repositories (legality of browser is not affected).
Most people, of course, just use a mainstream desktop OS, where this all is provided out of the box (and they've paid for it when they purchased their PC/Mac with that OS preinstalled).