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Wikimedia Community Debates H.264 Support On Wikipedia Sites.
bigmammoth writes "Wikimedia has been a long time supporter of royalty free formats, but is now considering a shift in their position. From the RfC: 'To support the MP4 standard as a complement to the open formats now used on our sites, it has been proposed that videos be automatically transcoded and stored in both open and MP4 formats on our sites, as soon as they are uploaded or viewed by users. The unencumbered WebM and Ogg versions would remain our primary reference for platforms that support them. But the MP4 versions 'would enable many mobile and desktop users who cannot view these unencumbered video files to watch them in MP4 format.'
This has stirred a heated debate within the Wikimedia community as to whether the mp4 / h.264 format should be supported. Many Wikimedia regulars have weighed in, resulting in currently an even split between adding the H.264 support or not. The request for comment is open to all users of Wikimedia, including the broader community of readers. What do you think about supporting H.264 on Wikimedia sites?"
Yes they should do this. Sometimes, you can't fight City Hall - you just have to go with the flow so that your website becomes more useful to people. It's annoying that media files on Wikipedia don't "just work" on most devices, not even desktops.
I appreciate their position and somewhat support it, but they've been holding out for so long now with absolutely no effect. The only losers are the site's users. At least Mp4 is a standard, albeit not as free as idealists would like.
MP4 is the industry standard, by choosing a non standard format they are knowingly limiting the amount of people that can view the format, really it is a braindead decision, information sharing shouldn't be about ideology. We have enough shit forced on people by governments already.
The best way to do this, should they choose to support the H.264 format, is to add a tiny annoyance to video files in that format. Like a 5 second intro that displays their policy in the format war, and how users are better off with the open version of the video.
Your problem is that the huge majority of Wikipedia users would be disgusted at your idea. Wikipedia is about getting information out in the best possible way. And for videos, whether you like it or not, h.264 is the best possible way. Whatever donations Wikipedia is getting today, intentionally messing with videos to annoy people will kill them. It's easier to get donations from people who are used to paying for value products and not from freetards.
Flash is still in use at 80% of the sites I visit.
Apple's management are jack-asses. Let the consumer harass them instead of whining to the websites that their iShiny's don't work.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.