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Wikipedia's Assault On Patent-Encumbered Codecs
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."
What I'm more worried about is that I cannot watch Wikipedia videos with any other device than my PC. Want to see a video clip of a place you're traveling on your phone? Not possible. Want to see videos from Wikipedia with your PS3/360? Not possible. It will create some serious problems, and I don't think Wikipedia is big enough to push the change alone.
In general I find the "must have hardware support now" argument a bit short sighted. By that reasoning there would never be any change in video codecs. In any case, the PS3 and 360 even combined represent a very small percentage of internet connected devices. And the 360's larger problem is not having a web browser so Wikipedia video would be streamed from your PC anyway and if needs must you can transcode on the fly.
As mobile phones go, my Nokia N900 plays Theora. It also runs Firefox. Fennec is on Maemo 5 (the N900's OS) and will soon be available for Android, Windows Mobile, and future MeeGo devices. Millions of devices in the field already have the capability to play Ogg Theora and it will only become more trivial to do so with Firefox releases for those platforms.
To be fair, the format is entirely open, but patent encumbered. Nobody would argue that MP3 is a closed format, for example.
IOW the only challenges are legal challenges (regarding software patents and royalties). They're not proprietary at all.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Why? Closed formats don't seem to operate under that constraint. In fact, technical qualities seem to be a non-issue as far as success goes in general.
"Its the money, stupid!"
No, not kickbacks, or payola, or licensing fees.
Lets start at the top. Content providers have been banging their head into the bandwidth wall for a decade, starting when the notion of streaming high quality video really took off. Their cost, primarily, is bandwidth. Their product, primarily, is eyeballs. Their revenue, primarily, is advertisers.
To make this work, they need to offer competitive quality in order to maximize the number of eyeballs, and they need to do it with the least bandwidth in order to offer competitive pricing to advertisers.
H.264 was a big improvement over the previous generation of codecs, which finally allowed what might finally be viable online video streaming businesses.
In this case, technically better still matters... its just about the only thing that matters. These businesses don't have the margin to fuck around. If they drop the ball then they lose their shot at #1.
"His name was James Damore."