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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?"
Wikimedia should stand their ground to provide a good reason for device manufacturers to add support for open video formats.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
And mid 2000's, and early 2010's.
FYI, I'm still not sure how to pronounce either of those :)
In every meaningful sense, MP4 is the most 'open' useful video CODEC every made available. The world's BEST video encoder, x264, is open-source and free. Every worthwhile tool you need to encode, process and watch H264 video is FREE. H264 decoding is supported almost universally in hardware by everything made today.
Meanwhile, the dreadful CODEC that Google bought was created illegally by using close-source development as a method of hiding the fact that it ripped off (badly) patented MPEG standards. After Google released the source, and the truth became obvious, Google simply used its billions to pay off the various IP owners whose patents the code infringed on. Google offers its CODEC for free ONLY because Google chooses to bear the IP costs inherent in the use of its CODEC.
It gets worse. The hardware support of Google's dreadful CODEC is almost non-existent, so Google class videos are frequently decoded on the CPU, using insanely greater amounts of energy. Encoding Google class video (which always gives worse results than x264 when other metrics are equivalent) also uses far more power. And you thought Google was "politically correct" and "green"?
All Google wants is control. And Google's incompetent rip-off of H264 and now their new rip-off of H265 are all about control. With H264 and H265, the user has control, and Google hates this. So Google seeds forums like this with the usual vile shills that seek to take advantage of people whose knowledge of the facts behind H264 and its horrifically bad, originally unlicensed copy, VP8, is non-existent.
PS putting Ogg (a TRUE free sound CODEC) and WebM (Google's licensed AFTER-the-fact terrible rip-off of H264) in the same sentence is as misleading an attempt at pro-Google propaganda as you can get.
By failing to support MP4/H264 they are defacto creating a means of censorship , i.e. denying the ability to watch the videos to those who do not share the same ideological stance.
This is bullshit. You're abusing the definition of censorship the way politicians abuse the word "terrorist".
And for these people the cost of paying for a H.264 encoder license is trivial compared to royalties they have to pay for images, video, and music.
And what about the developing world that is slowly coming online via shared community hubs? Won't they have the right to publish content too without paying exuberant rents compared to their income? The cost is trivial for everyone. I am sorry but open formats are the only way forward for a level playing field. All we are seeing with this WWF/H.264 debacle is a small amount of vested interests trying to justify extracting rents from the world population, when non are really required.
That these closed proprietary formats/DRM are clawing their way back into our "open" standards, services like Wikipedia and browsers is a testament to how committees, foundations (and once democratic institutions serving the public interest) can be infiltrated by vested interest and their purpose corrupted slowly from the inside out. It is a slippery slope, read todays news to see how absolutely low you can slide.
Now there is a category of people so disconnected from reality that are ok to overpay an already excessively rich phone manufacturer that refuse to support free format, and there only reaction to there frustration is to ask a poor free project to support commercial format. I wonder how many of them have donate something to Wikipedia.
But I am not so surprised. I have observed many times that a lot of people tend to be proud of what there have payed and disregards what there have not payed, even when the reality clearly show that there money was not worth the result. It's a childish behavior to ask others to fix your own false choice.
Why exactly is Apple not supporting the open standard? I'd really like to hear the defence of that decision, from both Apple and you. That's what this whole thing really comes down to ... why is Apple explicitly not supporting open formats.
It's an encyclopedia
Exactly, it should just support formats that users have and not play politics.
Wrong. I think it should "play politics" in this case. Wikipedia is one of the very few sites which, because of its popularity, uniqueness, and non-commercial nature, has some leverage over browser vendors, and has more freedom than others to make use of it.
Almost everywhere else on the web it's the other way round: The browser vendors can force the site owners into compliance. If you have a smallish website and you want to provide video content on it, you often have no choice than to use an encoding like H.264 that all browsers support -- thereby furthering the agenda of consortiums like MPEG LA to steer the market towards a universal adoption of a patent-encumbered "hands off" format, and also lessening the incentive for browser vendors to support open royalty-free encoding formats. But if you run the like 4th most popular site in the world, the only one of its kind, AND you're not commercially bound to maximize your number of visitors no matter what, then you have some power to drive the web (and the whole industry) in the direction of truly open, royalty-free, "free to tinker with" video encoding formats, which would help lower costs and market entry barriers for new companies and individuals. Wikipedia shouldn't throw this leverage away.
We "played the politics" a few years ago, there was momentum with at one point chrome saying it was planing to ~remove h.264~ from its browser. But in the end that did not pan out. Firefox ended up supporting h.264, and wikimedia was left with very little video participation by its exclusive support for royalty free formats.
... Its still too late to say to Apple .. hey if you don't support webm, you won't be able to view the near zero percentage of wikimedia articles that have video content. But when it comes to h.265 and vp9 or Daala, if Wikimedia was a large video player similar to youtube it could help add its weight behind free future free codecs guenteeing they have a prominante home on the web with an active video community.
Assuming the point of wikimedia is promote free codecs ( not get free information to people that want to access it )
Never, but it can add to a list of small frustrations, getting a user to switch manufacturers next contract renewal.
Someone who switches from an iPhone will lose all his purchased videos, all his purchased books, and all his purchased iPhone apps. Only the music is DRM-free. He would have to re-buy everything else on Android, provided that they're even available on Android and not exclusive to iTunes. The iPhone, for example, is the only phone that can stream video from Amazon.
The only reason the fight was given up was because Google gave up. Apparently they had no faith in WebM, despite having both formats on Youtube, so they renegged on their "promise" to drop support for H264 in Chrome.
If you ask me, it's got EVERYTHING to do with politics. Every time they do something like that, it causes trouble for competitors. Mozilla had to implement H264 when they did that. It had to also support VP9 when they introduced that. And they're having to scramble to support Media-streaming Extensions now as well. Opera just gave up entirely and became a Chrome clone. All because Google desired it, not because they had to do so.
You see, Google's about making money. It's not about winning or losing in a codec war, it's about who controls the future of web video. And if you can keep everyone scrambling to catch up, you can dictate what happens next. They're doing this in many areas of the web; SPDY (which basically became HTTP2), Pepper, NaCl, WebP, etc. They won't win them all, but they're all power plays to make sure Google's the one ahead of the curve while everyone else plays catch-up.
If someone can take a principled stance against this, they should. Right now the only entities with a spine are the ones who aren't for-profit, and none of them can stand up to it, and end users should really be supporting them. Do we really want Google and the MPEG-LA to dominate like that, knowing what happens every time companies dominate something like that?