Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Wikipedia's Assault On Patent-Encumbered Codecs

Posted by timothy on 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."

2 of 428 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Good luck with that by 2obvious4u · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Has anyone tried to create a unicorn using a horse and a narwhal? Why isn't there an island of Dr. Morrow anyway? I think that would be cool. Creating hybrid animals is cool. We should do more experiments along these lines.

  2. Re:HTML5 Video by Pentium100 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    sharing libraries (as it is done in Linux distros) is better than local-copy-for-every-app as as typical in Windows as OS X.

    This is the part about linux that I hate the most.

    If I have a PC that is not connected to the internet and want to install some program, if that PC is running Windows, I can buy or download the program, write it to a CD or DVD, carry the disc to the computer without connection, put the disc in and install the program. I may be asked to also install .NET, DirectX or some other big part. I can install them, actually, I probably should install them, they are available for download, I can get them, write them to a CD...

    This would at most cause me two trips (I arrive with the CD and find out that I need .NET, time to go back and download .NET).

    On Linux it's different. I can download the program (be it as a source or .rpm or whatever), write it to a CD, go to the PC without internet connection, try to install it and find out that it needs lib01. Go back, get lib01, try to install it, find out that it needs lib02 and continue until finding out that lib37-127.0.0.1 conflicts with pretty much every program on that PC.

    tools like apt-get and yum reduce this problem, assuming you have internet connection, and the program is in the repository.