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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).'"
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
That's true whining. Install the proper codec.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
Hi. I'm from the distant future. Your post is still not censored. Beta still sucks.
"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.
So you're still installing RealPlayer and VivoActive players on all of your machines because they were once the de facto encoding formats? Oh that's right, some people remember the late 90s and the debacle of having to transcode over and over again every time there's a new "best" video or audio format.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Freedom is letting people use what codecs they want, not forcing them to use a handful of really terrible ones.
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?
It's the formats that are mandated. The "codec" is not. You can write your own VP8 codec from scratch, using the specs, if you choose. Do that with H.264, though, and you're liable for patent royalties. What's more, the MPEG-LA won't sell an individual a license to begin with, so there's no practical way for you to go legit.
And your terms are mixed-up... everyone does anything they want is called "anarchy". Calling that "freedom" is completely misusing the term. Being "free" to impose onerous terms onto others isn't any flavor of "freedom".
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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.
Freedom is letting people use what codecs they want, not forcing them to use a handful of really terrible ones.
Wikimedia are serving up data. Accusing them of forcing people to use terrible codecs is like accusing someone of restricting your right to eat beef because they opened a fish and chip shop.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
Thank you. It isn't that I can't, it isn't that I won't, it is "why should I spend more and more time doing what you want me to do to support your ideology, rather than what I think I need to do?"
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.
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.
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?
From the Wikimedia Foundation MIssion Statement:
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.
..and from the Wikipedia page:
The Wikimedia Foundation's stated goal is to develop and maintain open content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge.
...although it doesn't explicitly state that patent-unencumbered formats are necessary for those goals, but it's safe to say that insisting on them is fully compatible with those goals. No more ideological than the rest of their 'crusade', IMO.
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.
To me, it's more like:you show up to a benefit potluck for your local library, and people start complaining that some people are charging money on the side for (or restricting access to) the food they bring. Do you want those people at your potluck?
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
You lie.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
MPEG-LA had 20 years to find a court to rule that ON2's codecs infringed. They never did. That makes everything you say a lie. Google and MPEG-LA have now made peace so there will be no problems.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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...
If true, then it's time to develop a truly open codec, not get further into bed with MPEG by switching to h264.
Not if the goal is to ensure the content remains protected from patent trolls being used as weapons by those wishing to censor such content.
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!
Yes, that's the very definition of freedom. You are not required to do anything you don't want to (install other codecs) and they are not required to do anything they don't want to (serve other codecs). If one party is unhappy with the consequences of their decision, they are free to reevaluate. If you decide you want the media bad enough, you can install the required codecs. If they decide there is a drop in traffic they find unacceptable they can choose to start serving up other codecs again.
There is no possible way this situation could be more free.
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.
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.
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
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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
If you don't like Wikimedia's choices, you are absolutely free start your own Wikimedia. With blackjack. And hookers.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
"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 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."
Free in that statement is about free as in freedom, not free as in beer
And therefore the BETASUCKS campaign was an abject failure.
Fine.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
No, it'd be like a regular customer of the fish and chip shop complaining that they've decided to stop selling fish and chips.
VP8 turned out to be patent encumbered, what is to say VP9 won't also be?
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.