Slashdot Mirror
FLOSS Codecs Emerge Victorious In Wikimedia Vote
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Maggs from the Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team has given a final summary of the discussion and vote about whether to support MP4 video or not. Twice as many people voted against adding MP4 to Wikimedia than voted for full support. Now they can get back to their mission of advocating openness. 'Those opposing MP4 adoption believe that in order for what we create to be truly free, the format that it is in also needs to be free, (else everyone viewing it would need to obtain a patent license in some form to be able to view it). ... From that viewpoint, any software infrastructure in Wikimedia projects must adhere to community norms regarding intellectual property, patent status, licensing or encoding methods. Current community requirements are that free/open standards should be used at all times to encode and store video files on the servers that house our data, so that both our content and software can be redistributed without any restrictions. Proprietary video containers or codecs such as MP4 are not allowed on Wikimedia projects because they are patent-encumbered and their software cannot be re-licensed freely (though MP4 content can be freely re-licensed).'"
Watch them censor me. Soulskill you're a liar
" Now they can get back to their mission of advocating openness"
Including MP4?
--jp
But my tablet and phone have built-in hardware decoders.
Nothing can compete with that.
Is that true? What does he mean by "re-license" in relation to the content of an MP4? (Or maybe I should ask what he means by "content".)
How does the MP4 codec have anything to do with the license regarding the content of an MP4 file?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Mobile devices have efficient hardware support for codecs like H.264, and using something else takes a toll on battery life.
There was an initial surge of pro-mpeg votes by people connected to the WikiMedia Foundation and the technical team which would have been implementing it, then there were many days of mostly anti-mpeg voting when normal Wikipedia contributors heard about this idea.
As someone who has been campaigning for many years against software patents, it was very encouraging to see that the general Wikipedia populous (i.e. after the initial pro-mpeg surge from employees and pre-briefed technicians) was two-thirds against the use of patented formats.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Gee, what are we fighting for anyway? Video killed the radio star, internet killed the movie star, who gives a fuck.
The whole issue is about idealism, not practicality. In practice, MP4s are available on pretty much any device.
Unfortunately, that idealism is shooting wikimedia in the foot, because there are platforms that don't have open source codecs installed by default, leaving the "average" user unable to view the videos.
So in their zeal to pursue "openness", they've closed the doors on the people who matter most: the users.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
My question is unrelated to wikimedia, but this seems like the right place to discuss the alternatives to h264/mp4.
I often have to encode videos to send to a few people. Most are computer-illiterate, and it needs to "just work". So I use H264 in Quicktime .mov, because most users have Macs, and those who have Windows definitely have Quicktime installed. I guess .m4v might also work as a container, except it doesn't have a timecode track.
But for the codec, is there a realistic alternative to H264 today? A format which can fit a feature-length HD movie in high quality in a file under 4GB so that it fits on any USB stick including FAT32, and that anyone can read?
The summary is wrong:
* Michael Maggs is NOT from the Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia#Team - He is simply a Commons Bureaucrat (like a super-sysop)
Incorrect to imply that staff were all for it. There are 5 staff opposing it, including from the multimedia team itself, within the first 55 votes.
The choices were between media being posted in every available codec or only approved FLOSS. So now, I get to watch 1/2 of what's available because someone doesn't like my choice of codec. That's true freedom.
They are only accepting Vorbis/FLAC audio, Theora video, in ogg containers? Or is everything good as long as the container isn't proprietary?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
For information only, the raw, unadjusted, uncorrected figures were:
Prefer full MP4 support: 145
Prefer partial MP4 support - viewing only: 4
Prefer partial MP4 support - contributions only: 56
Neutral: 7
Prefer no MP4 support: 309
Total 521
Is the function of a resource like the Wikipedia to serve its larger audience or its ideological purists?
If you know anyone who cannot legally play an MP4 video, I would like to meet them. If you can frame an intelligible argument for refusing MP4 video contributions, I would like to hear it.
What's next, Slashdot runs some very intrusive video ads to help Wikimedia with their next round of begging?
Communism was very popular once upon a time. Soon it became obvious that the many freetards will suck the tits of the few until the few are no more.
Now they can get back to their mission of advocating openness.
This, in a nutshell, illuminates the tender root of the controversy. Who said their primary mission was advocating openness? I thought their mission was building an online encyclopedia. (Or as the Wikimedia Foundation puts it more generally, "... to bring free educational content to the world.") When did it turn into an ideological crusade?
It's like you show up to a benefit potluck for your local library, and people start ranting about how the food people brought isn't vegan. I thought we were all here because we like books - there's no need to accusing people of torturing animals and destroying the environment just because someone brought Guinness. He also brought plenty of beer that doesn't use isinglass*, feel free to drink that instead.
* I'd link to the Wikipedia article, but apparently it's not just an encyclopedia but also a political statment. So I'll just tell you to use whatever encyclopedic resource most closely aligns with your worldview.
It's a container. It would be nice if not only the summary writers but also the headlines writers were aware of this, but then, this is Slashot.
We got stuck with realplayer for years
The popularity of LZW led CompuServe to choose it as the compression technique for their GIF format, developed in 1987. At the time, CompuServe was not aware of the patent.Unisys became aware that the GIF format used the LZW compression technique and entered into licensing negotiations with CompuServe in January 1993. The subsequent agreement was announced on 24 December 1994.Unisys stated that they expected all major commercial on-line information services companies employing the LZW patent to license the technology from Unisys at a reasonable rate, but that they would not require licensing, or fees to be paid, for non-commercial, non-profit GIF-based applications, including those for use on the on-line services.
Following this announcement, there was widespread condemnation of CompuServe and Unisys, and many software developers threatened to stop using the GIF format. The PNG format (see below) was developed in 1995 as an intended replacement.However, obtaining support from the makers of Web browsers and other software for the PNG format proved difficult and it was not possible to replace the GIF format, although PNG has gradually increased in popularity. The libungif library was written to allow creation of GIFs that followed the data format but avoided the compression features, thus avoiding use of the Unisys LZW patent.
In August 1999, Unisys changed the details of their licensing practice, announcing the option for owners of certain non-commercial and private websites to obtain licenses on payment of a one-time license fee of $5000 or $7500. Such licenses were not required for website owners or other GIF users who had used licensed software to generate GIFs. Nevertheless, Unisys was subjected to thousands of online attacks and abusive emails from users believing that they were going to be charged $5000 or sued for using GIFs on their websites. Despite giving free licenses to hundreds of non-profit organizations, schools and governments, Unisys was completely unable to generate any good publicity and continued to be condemned by individuals and organizations such as the League for Programming Freedom who started the "Burn All GIFs" campaign.
I would be on your side, but:
1) Any proof for all these entertaining allegations about Google's "fake free codec"? In particular, I would like to know firstly how it is a "fake codec" and, if that cannot be done, how it is not free. (I would further like you to go back to school and learn how to present what we must refer to as "arguments" in English, but that is beside the current point.)
2) The claim that H.264 is "the world's best video encoder" is... extravagant, to say the least. What can you present to back that rather wild claim up? I would appreciate comparisons against not only direct competitors but also the likes of, let's say, H.265. I would also very much appreciate the word "best" being properly defined before such a study is performed, so that there are no misunderstandings along the way.
3) I'm a bit bemused by your conflation of H.264 and x264. Would you like to clarify this issue? I would like you to go into more detail on your sentence "H264 has the world's best video encoder", the claim "which also happens to be... free and open source", and then the sudden jump to statement such as "x264 [sic] videos are less than HALF the size of videos produced for Google's fake [sic] free codec". In each of these cases I require both firm evidence and firm argument, and additionally require a logical connection between your statements concerning H.264 and your statements concerning x264. I would further appreciate a brief discussion of the difference between H.264 and x264, although I understand this may be beyond your ken.
As I say, I would be on your side, but you're not helping those of us who think Wikimedia's opposition to a closed "codec" such as MP4 -- to be fair, Wikimedia never called MP4 a codec; that's purely the fault of whichever ignoramus wrote the Slashdot headline -- is ridiculous, and I don't like people being on my side and making me look like a moron by proxy.
Windows is losing big time, while linux is fixing is own kernel Windows should do the same
I guess the shill shoe is on the other foot once you shill it like that.
Goog is ~1200 dollars a share
Keep it free! Don't let any 3rd party have any "foot in the door" to possibly restrict content.
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
Oh look, it's the "VPx stole mpeg patents" troll again. Ho hum.
Riddle me this: if VPx used H.264 patents, why isn't it as good? After all you're the one claiming it's shit, is H.264, using these patented encoding techniques also shit?
It's obvious to anyone who actually followed the news of the whole process what really happened is VPx was H264, with the patent encumbered bits removed. That's why it's not as good. It's also why your rant is a blatant lie.
>> while linux is fixing is own kernel
hashtag lol out loud
"user" is a good word for you, more power to the soda pusher and his profits, just cause that's what make you feel good..
the rest of us are trying to make this a better place, sorry if that spoils your day, makes you have to actually install something, for once.
Or Microsoft Windows device. Don't cry to wikimedia because you can't view content as a result.
If your not part of the solution stay out of the way.
File formats aren't copyrightable, and therefore the "FLOSS" label does not apply. Only specific software is copyrightable, and last I checked, there's a plethora of Free Software encoders and decoders, including ffmpeg, x264, etc.
What the maintainer of the codec wishes to do isn't my problem, and it's not Wikimedia's problem.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
The FLOSS version of "freedom" is exactly the same as the ultra left, the actual translation should be "free to be like me, free to do as I say, free to have no other choices".
No different than how the ultra left is "all for freedom of speech"...as long as you are pro LGBT, pro AGW, pro white guilt, etc. If you are not? Then you are a monster who should lose your job and have your speech taken away, you racist hater you!
So until FLOSS has a "free to disagree" attitude? Then they can piss right off along with the ultra left and right as far as I'm concerned, both are forcing their views and stifling dissent, and that is bullshit. All they have done is insure that many poor in many countries that ONLY have a portable media device like a cellphone or tablet, which includes a large chunk of the third world, can't access the content because it won't play on their devices. Way to go douchebags.
I found it quite interesting to go over the comments of the staff. It seems that there is quite a strong push for accepting MP4 from the management of the multimedia people.
Everybody seems to be quite concerned about the lack of video content on wikipedia, but what strikes me is the explanation that they have come up for it: people don't contribute more videos because it's difficult to transcode from some proprietary format to WebM/Theora. I found this justification quite absurd. Imagine you decide to shoot some video for an article in wikipedia. Then you shoot it, edit it, and try upload it; now you discover that the format that you used cannot be uploaded. What do you do? Give up? Come on.
Of course, the other reason is that H.264 has widespread hardware decoding, which makes it much nicer to the users on mobile devices. Which is true, but hardly worth the cost of betraying wikipedia's principles.
NO SINGLE audio chipset has built in support for VP8/WebM.
And btw ... VP8 has a good number of proprietary techs, many that aren't even owned by Google.
WebM is a cesspool of legal limbo .... because Google doesn't own over 60% of the patents that apply to it.
It's obvious to anyone who actually followed the news of the whole process what really happened is VPx was H263, with the patent encumbered bits removed.That's why it's not as good. FTFY
They legalize x264.
They seem to use "MP4" and "H.264" in a pretty much interchangeable way in the original article. This does nothing but make things difficult to understand. Here's what they really need to standardize upon:
- a container format (such as mkv or mp4/m4v)
- a video codec (such as VP8 or H.264)
- an audio codec (such as Vorbis or AAC)
In order to make it "open/free", they need to chose all three components in this respect, such as an mkv container with VP8 video and Vorbis audio inside. Which will guarantee that the result won't play on any device right out of the box. OTOH if they chose something like m4v with H.264 video and AAC audio inside, it will play right out of the box on about anything from Windows PCs to tablets to PS3s to WD TV live boxes. The patent stuff doesn't affect the end user as these devices are already licensed to use the mentioned containers/codecs (and in a pretty efficient way such as having hardware accelerators). Now even if they figure out the video part, I'm curios what they're gonna use for audio codec/compression. There isn't much to chose from that isn't patented either.
No single audio chipset has support for VP8, a video format? No shit!
And btw... name those proprietary techs.
Here's the checked-in patch, so check it out.
Opus is already in released Firefox, and here's the checked-in patch for VP9, so check it out.
The Nexus 5 has built-in VP8 hardware support for both decode and encode.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Firefox OS devices play VP9 and Opus out of the box, your faux curiosity omitted Opus, and your point is invalid.
So you don't make the same mistake in future, keep an eye out for the upcoming Daala video codec.
and then they don't have to call you on that phone, because it plays WebM just fine.
Radio National is Real Audio or Windows Media Audio only :(
Even Archive.org supports MP4, among other formats. YouTube does both Flash and MP4 for the most part, or at least most of the third party downloaders will give it to you in MP4. Clearly the solution is to provide the content in a couple of formats, enough to serve THE USERS. Unless that is, you don't give a shit about users, in which case I don't see why you need a web presence at all...
As if there won't ever be new patents made up to accompany their latest codec version. So no, you still won't be able to make that kind of statement.
If true, then it's time to develop a truly open codec, not get further into bed with MPEG by switching to h264.
The device manufacturers are after all free to implement hardware decoders for open codecs as well, and unlike H.264 they don't even need to pay any royalty fees to do so.
The thirty H.264 licensors are for the globally dominant players in digital video and so are paying royalties to themselves. We are talking pennies or fractions of a penny per unit here for a cartel the size of Mitsubishi.
There is an enterprise cap on H.264 royalties.
There are 1,300 H.264 licensees --- each fabulously wealthy in their own right --- and each with a commitment to H.264 that extends far beyond the web.
AVC/H.264 Licensees
The numbers game:
Disney's Frozen "Let It Go" Sequence Performed by Idina Menzel
Released for distribution through YouTube December 6th. Protected content. 94.7 million views. Should reach 100 million views by mid-week. A plausible guess for all things Frozen on You Tube would be 200-250 million views before Oscar night:
Let It Go - Frozen - Alex Boye (Africanized Tribal Cover) 6 million views in three days.
Now place yourself in the position of the device manufacturer.
Do you prioritize for the open media of Wikimedia or for H.264 and Disney?
The first issue can be solved by re-encoding the video on the Wikipedia side, a'la youtube.
MP4 is a media file container (technically MPEG-4 Part 14, or ISO/IEC 14496-14).
MPEG-4 Part 10 aka ISO/IEC 14496-10 aka AVC aka ITU-T H.264 is a codec that is often found in MP4 containers (except when it is found in MPEG transport streams, such as in Apple HLS).
There are other video codecs that can be in an MP4 container, such as MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-2, or MPEG-1.
By the way, HEVC (aka ISO/IEC 23008-2 MPEG-H Part 2 aka ITU-T H.265) is amazingly efficient and everyone should switch to it immediately :)
I bought a camera and a notebook. Thus a license for creating and viewing H.264 was forced upon me. I use FLOSS for H.264. I never look back. Wikipedia is for the whole world. People like me having a player license from MPEG-LA does not mean, other have it, too. And I am still not allowed to produce professionally and distribute. Wikimedia is not youtube. I do not like other people watching videos using the money I spend (or may spend). Bandwidth hog. Limit global video bandwidth on Wikipedia. I do not like unformatted data. Limit audio, limit bitmaps and jpegs. SVG is slightly better. See how many articles feature these nice and standardized tables!
It doesn't matter what codec a publisher likes. This is not an area where you get to express yourself. You publish in MP4 because it is the only universal video codec. Anything else might as well be encrypted and the user has no key. They are not going to see any video.
From the Wikimedia Foundation MIssion Statement:
Remember, it's the closed nature of how Encyclopedia Britannica was published that led to wikipedia in the first place.
Most of the third world is bypassing the PC for tablets and cellphones which means that Wikimedia just took a big old shit all over them by making sure their content will not play on all those low end tablets and smartphones which have H264 acceleration but NOT WebM and NO way to change that.
Just another case of "I'm white and can afford to be 'right' because who cares about all those poor browns and blacks, they are out of sight" After all Wikipedia is now a site for pushing the FSF agenda and NOT a free encyclopedia for the world....self righteous douchebags, that is what they are.
It's not absurd at all if you think about the different workflows that could be used. If the video was edited on a desktop-based software, some time was already spent transferring the video from the recorder to the desktop, and a wide choice of video codecs are available.
But it's a bit different if the video was taken on a mobile device. Here, the "editing" part might have been much quicker (just a few clippings with the built-in app), and very few codecs might be available.
So it's not really about decoding, but encoding. The idea was to allow people shooting from mobile devices to easily upload content to wikimedia. You might think that this content would have been low quality anyway, but it might be better than no content.
Despite being one of the richest companies on the planet? Frankly should be proof enough. When someone raised the issue to Microsoft over their shared source code? They quickly offered to indemnify their users, try bringing that up to Google and see how quick you are told to STFU. Considering the author of Theora said "There is no way to make a modern codec that doesn't infringe" because all modern ways to compress/decompress is patented and the fact that Google won't step up to the plate? Well now its up to the FLOSS advocates to show that it is actually free.
This was precisely one of the options of the poll, which was voted against (only about 10% of support).
That might be technically true... Google owns the patents on VP8. But since they've offered an irrevocable perpetual royalty free license to the entire world, it's unencumbered for all reasonable, practical purposes.
VP3 was open-sourced over a decade ago, and no lawsuits ever came out of that. Are you suggesting On2 only RECENTLY started stealing MPEG patents? When exactly? And let's not forget that VP9 was not developed until years after Google acquired On2, and just recently released.
All of H.264's patents must be worth many billions of dollars over their lifetime. If Google had paid out anything like that, it would be obvious from stock prices, SEC filings, etc., etc. Instead, Google paid a piddly little amount to MPEG-LA, and it's they who wanted the NDA to save face. MPEG-LA argued for years that they owned patents that covered VP8, yet after years only came up with a very short-list, and still most of that was found laughably irrelevant. H.264 is covered by THOUSANDS of patents, by HUNDREDS of companies. The deal Google entered into only involved 11 of those hundreds of companies, yet that was enough to get MPEG-LA to declare full stop on any harassment of VP8.
The reality:
"This agreement is not an acknowledgment that the licensed techniques read on VP8. The purpose of this agreement is meant to provide further and stronger reassurance to implementors of VP8."
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archi...
In fact, the MPEG-LA's posturing was being investigated by the DoJ as anticompetitive behavior:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
Yes they did. They even did so in court, and they unequivocally WON:
http://blog.webmproject.org/20...
This is straightforward to disprove.
An x264 developer said of the first version of libvpx decoding:
"the current implementation appears to be about 16% slower than ffmpeg's H.264 decoder"
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/a...
But since then, numerous performance improvements have been performed:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/a...
Actually, hardware acceleration isn't a big deal. The difference between VDPAU and software decoding of 1080 video on my PC is just a few percentage points. When my phone switches from hardware to software decoding (you can force this with "Mobo Player"), the performance and power difference is very small, and goes almost completely unnoticed. Hardware acceleration mattered a lot when mobile devices ran with 35MHz CPUs, but today, it makes a very tiny difference.
Back in 2010 when comparing the just introduced an
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
More sources:
Hardware acceleration only improves battery life "up to 36%". That's pretty insignificant to me.
http://blog.webmproject.org/20...
Quality improvements have been going non-stop:
http://blog.webmproject.org/20...
http://blog.webmproject.org/20...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Even after coding your h.264 video to theora you still need to pay license fees if your video is distributed widely.
If h.264 was ever used in the production chain. For example consumer and prosumer video cameras use h.264 compression, however these cameras do not come with a license for wide spread distribution of video. The licence only covers friends and family viewers.
The license fees for large distribution is very steep and is based on the amount of viewers of the video.
Thanks for dropping in.
I'll just note that "populous" is an adjective, not a noun, for which you'll be wanting "populace".
Cheers.
In performance, perhaps. However, some people have other priorities besides performance.
What, like power or bandwidth? Someone has to pay for these too. If going for a "free" codec only moves the cost somewhere else, then it's not "free".
Like the poster above me said; no single audio chipset supports a video codec? You don't say?
Yuh huh. Care to name any of them?
"Now they can get back to their mission of advocating openness."
That was never the mission. This is what they call "mission creep".
As someone that is responsible for creating more content than most of the "no votes" put together, I shake my head in shame.
It's not absurd at all if you think about the different workflows that could be used.
The AC's choice of the word "absurd" may be a mild hyperbole (if you pardon the oxymoron), but it certainly fails the Occam's Razor test. Which is more likely: that Wikipedia's editors aren't into videos, or that WP's editors really love video editing but don't understand transcoding?
The best explanation for the lack of video in Wikimedia Commons is that it's heavily tied to Wikipedia, and web video simply isn't compatible with the way Wikipedia works. You can't re-edit videos ad infinitum the way you can edit a WP article or a .SVG graphic -- all the web video standards are delivery formats, not editable archive formats. There's no collaboration, no iterative improvement, no refinement -- it's like it or lump it, which is an alien design philosophy to WP types.
In fact, now that I mention SVG... notice that Wikimedia has ditched officially ditched bitmaps for pretty much everything except JPEG photos, officially favouring SVG vector images as editable source formats. Adopting a delivery format for an archive operation is completely against what they stand for.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
That would be a pretty major stretch of the law.
If you record video to a patented codec then your recorder needs a license.
If you transcode video to/from a patented codec then your transcoder needs a license.
If you distribute video encoded in a patented codec then the viewers need a license (and *maybe* you need a distribution license, though I suspect that's getting into a legal grey area)
But just because your video passed through a stage where it was encoded in a patented codec doesn't mean that the patent holders now have perpetual license-extraction rights on it. If that were the case then every digital camera could internally use a patented codec as one stage in the recording process and guarantee perpetual license fees on your videos, even if you personally never even saw that the video had ever been in an encumbered format.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Unless you capitalize it, though I have no idea why playing Populous would be associated with Wikipedia.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I am surprised there is so much debate here on this. Apparently I have a different understanding of Wikimedia's core mission than some people. In my understanding, their mission is to provide, without restriction, community curated knowledge, period. It is temporarily unfortunate that some (even a significant quantity of) people may be unable to benefit from supporting media to the core knowledge because the platform they are paying for in turn forces them to pay a license for the proprietary technology to read such material. But in the long run it is absolutely appropriate that no proprietary technology should be required to read a single digital bit of the material that Wikipedia provides. To have allowed h.264 would have subtly subverted the core mission.
If you prefer to be locked in with with your propritetary software/codec/hardware, thats up to you, you can start your own wiki with your own rules.
i imagine that if no other humans wanted to continue to update this FLOSS for new devices, it might be something that the WMF could take on itself, and since it wouldnt have to buy the rights to do so, the cost would only be programming hours. In fact, wouldnt it make sense that WMF would someday offer copyright-software, sort of a WikiSoft?
Every video on the entire internet needs to be re-encoded yet again?
Software patents fuck up so much progress.
Only a moron think x264 is not a codec.
Keep the complaints coming! I love hearing you whine -- but what I really love is seeing whiners lose.
I am puzzled why you think that a free, charitably supported, nonprofit, publicly edited encyclopedia wouldn't have idealism as one of its core principles. Idealism protects people without legal teams who want to develop things without fear of being sued later. Yes, I'm talking about all those poor browns and blacks that you just took a big old shit all over with your false reasoning.
If you actually were in the third world you'd notice Mozilla is partnering with plenty of low-end device manufacturers to bring Firefox OS phones to that market.
Just "Google", "Bing", "Yahoo" or whatever for: webm legal issues.
Even Google agreed that V8/WebM infringes on a multiple patents.
It's a *free* encyclopedia, as its every page says.
Also, the RFC was more about Wikimedia Commons.
H.264 has never been supported there. So they didn't decide to stop selling fish and chips, they have never sold them.
They should be replaced with my comments, expressing my opinion in a similar style. What's mine is mine and what's yours is mine.