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).'"

Comments

Re:This means

[evilviper]

They are only accepting Vorbis/FLAC audio, Theora video, in ogg containers?

You seem to be a few years behind the times... WebM is perfectly FLOSS, and much improved.

For lossy audio, in addition to Vorbis, there is the much better Opus codec. FLAC is the standard for lossless, as there isn't much room for improvement.

For video, VP8 (and soon, VP9) are vastly superior to Theora.

And WebM uses the MKV container... not the horrific Ogg.

Most web browsers support WebM... Chrome/Chromium and Firefox/IceWeasel have support built-in, though the later is lagging a bit behind on VP9/Opus. And IE users can play WebM videos by just installing the codec pack.

The "Video Without Flash" add-on for Firefox will allow you to watch all videos on the most popular video sites in native/WebM format. Not only does this help those who can't get Flash, but also native WebM playback is vastly less resource intensive and far more responsive.