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?"

Comments

Stand their ground

[wiredlogic]

Wikimedia should stand their ground to provide a good reason for device manufacturers to add support for open video formats.

Re:Stand their ground

[TimMD909]

Android already supports WebM (http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html). I'm thinking this is more of a "should we care about the people with iPhones?" My answer would be "no." That'll add more pressure on Apple to not be jackasses w/ their mobile OS.

Re:Stand their ground

[ducomputergeek]

The open formats lost this round. Sorry, but with H2.64 we've finally had a "Standard Codec" and format that allows content creators to encode the media once and just about reach everyone. If the open standards offered a significant technical advantage, i.e. better compression without loss of quality or faster encoding vs H.264 then they'd be open to listening. But as I've talked to a lot of content creators over the past few years, many of whom remember the days of creating a quicktime video, a Windows Media video, a Real Player video and none of them wish to go back to it. 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.

Re:Stand their ground

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

I can't see how Wiki has all that much leverage.

Looking at the list of most popular websites, I think only facebook & youtube would have more influence on video-standards settings.

When did you last see someone turn down one Smartphone for another because it couldn't play a wiki video?

Never, but it can add to a list of small frustrations, getting a user to switch manufacturers next contract renewal. You don't have to be the sole reason for a change to have leverage over manufacturers.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Android already supports WebM (http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html). I'm thinking this is more of a "should we care about the people with iPhones?"

My answer would be "no." That'll add more pressure on Apple to not be jackasses w/ their mobile OS.

Remember Flash? Me neither. Fighting H.264 is tilting at windmills. The vast majority of people couldn't care less about free (to them) video formats as long as stuff works and looks good.

Re:Stand their ground

[ducomputergeek]

Depends on your traffic. I run a content rich site for a client of mine and we realized something as we did our quarterly review: Mobile users are now 60% of all traffic to her site. Of that, the biggest block of users are from iPad at almost 30% of all traffic. iPhone makes up another 18% and all Android devices make up about 13% of our traffic. There is another 6% of traffic that is iPods. So as it stands right now iOS is over 50% of all traffic.

Think we are going to ignore iOS? Think again. Instead we've decided that it's time to add a native mobile app for iOS targeting specifically iPad.

Re:Stand their ground

[tlhIngan]

Pretty much. Open standards can't gain ground unless someone insists on using them. It is like Microsoft's Office Documents in their battle agaisnt literally anything else. If no one objects to the propietary lock in, the open alternatives have to fight for their survival at a severe disadvantage.

Or prove superiority.

Right now, there is NO advantage to WebM or VP8 over h.264. The only reason to choose it is purely philosophical, especially since it's inferiority.

No, if you want to push an open standard, you go to prove its superiority. Why do you think Google has basically abandoned VP8 (which is a crap unimplementable standard) and pushing hard for VP9? Because the next-generation codec war has just begun. And it's between h.265 and VP9.

h.264 war is lost - there is too much entrenched.

But the next gen codec war is not, and in the battle between h.265 and VP9, there aren't as much legacy to worry about. If VP9 is completely royalty free, guess what? The industry consortium will pick it, even if it is inferior to h.265 because being able to crank out parts with VP9 decoders for free means more profit for them. (And didn't Google pretty much pay off all royalties for VP9?).

Standing your ground may win you the battle, but if you lose sight that h.264's relevance is going to diminish in the next few years to be replaced by the next gen h.265, then you've lost the war. Best to move on, and put your energy into promoting VP9 so it becomes standard.

Hell, Google's stopped promoting VP8 a while ago - they wanted to add it as an option for YouTube, and it's fizzled out for that reason - Google realizes it's not worth winning the WebM/VP8 war - it's too entrenched. Just move on to next gen when the standards are still malleable and inclusion and acceptance are easy.

And it'll be an easier sell, too. Right now if you make a graphics chip, you're going to pay the h.264 royalties even if you want WebM/VP9 because it's an expected feature. But in your new chip, you're still paying for h.264, but VP9, you don't have to pay! You as the manufacturer get to keep that extra 25 cents per unit.

Re:Stand their ground

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Wikimedia's mission:

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

The question is does supporting H.264 media files help or hinder their mission?

If their goal is to disseminate the educational content effectively then it would seem logical that they provide a media format that is widely supported.

It's really up to WebM and Ogg to promote their format. Wikimedia should stick to their own mission which is to provide educational content.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's exactly it: the world doesn't just revolve around people who are paying royalties on image/video/music. If Wikipedia accepts this, then the people who can't afford to pay that (and that includes many people who just don't want to deal with such licenes, for whom even $0.01 is too much) get screwed.

Open codecs aren't about being the best, they're about being for everyone.

Re:Stand their ground

[StripedCow]

Wikimedia should stand their ground to provide a good reason for device manufacturers to add support for open video formats.

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.

Re:Stand their ground

[Tough Love]

Google's stopped promoting VP8 a while ago - they wanted to add it as an option for YouTube, and it's fizzled out for that reason - Google realizes it's not worth winning the WebM/VP8 war

What nonsense. Google didn't stop promoting VP8, they just started referring to it as WebM.

Incidentally, I much prefer the HTML5 player, it integrates properly with my browser controls as opposed to flash player, which was always infuriorating. And I don't know about your browser, but WebM is is available in my browser and H.264 is not.

Re:Stand their ground

[xvan]

What about the "under a free license" part?

Re:Stand their ground

[Darinbob]

Flash? People didn't care about free or not, so Flash was big and fighting against Flash was tilting against windmills. But today Flash is greatly diminished. Thus the lesson here is to NOT give up pushing back against H.264.

Re:Stand their ground

[lgw]

Why? I can watch and rip to H.264 with free (as in beer) tools. Is this some political thing? My tools don't convert to *.BasementVirgin, or whatever format this is. Just Works wins for me, sorry.

The "next format" is H.265, as far as I care, but only when that Just Works.

Re:Stand their ground

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I believe they meant the content to be under a free license not necessarily the media itself. Besides H.264 is free for the content consumer.

Re:Stand their ground

[symbolset]

This course of derision has not worked out well for fans of MPEG-LA so far. So by all means keep it up. God forbid you people take a civil, persuasive tack to win friends and influence people - you might somewhere.

Re:Stand their ground

[Kjella]

Looking at the list of most popular websites, I think only facebook & youtube would have more influence on video-standards settings.

People don't visit Wikipedia for the videos any more than they read Playboy for the articles. That you even put it in the same class as YouTube only makes you sound delusional, they are 99.99% video and Wikipedia is 99.99% not. When Google that owns the VP8 codec, owns YouTube and makes Android and Chrome don't want to eat their own dog food and push their own codec on their own site to their own devices and browser it'll never be more than an obscure alternative for ideological circlejerks, like art critics patting each other on the back for recognizing true art while the rest of the world watches Hollywood blockbusters.

Even Firefox has surrendered on this one and said they'd use the binary blob Cisco provides, if Wikimedia wants to be the Japanese soldiers hiding in the forest 10 years after the war is over and keep denying it's over and that they lost it's their problem. And by forest I mean /. where Ogg Vorbis never dies even though it totally* failed to catch any mainstream use. * Cue the counterexamples, the way Munich shows that Linux is totally going to take over the desktop. But to use an old proverb, one swallow does not a summer make.

Re:Stand their ground

[Anonymous Psychopath]

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.

Have you been under a rock for the past couple years? Flash is dead, and Apple killed it. It went from being used on damn near every site around to less than 15% today. It cannot be used on an iOS or Android device. Adobe has abandoned it. You should be thanking Apple for leading the charge to kill that turd instead of cursing them as jackasses.

MP4 is open

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:MP4 is open

[Nerdfest]

It is not open in any sense of the word. The decoder is free as in beer, the encoder is not.

"These people?"

[FriendlyLurker]

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.

Re:"These people?"

[FriendlyLurker]

Sure Wikipedia isn't going to strongarm Apple into supporting WebM and OGG, and conversely Wikipedia does not need to be strong-armed by Apple or its vocal users into supporting closed software patent encumbered protocols.

Re:Why?

[multi io]

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.

Re:Why?

[bigmammoth]

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.

Assuming the point of wikimedia is promote free codecs ( not get free information to people that want to access it ) ... 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.