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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).'"
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!
Just what it sounds like. You can produce an MP4 and license the video itself (the "content") under a free license like Creative Commons, but the software required to play back that CC licensed video content is patent-encumbered and cannot be freely re-licensed.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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.
Freedom isn't free.
To be fair, you cannot freely re-license any open source codecs either - at least not without contacting all of the folks who contributed to the project and getting their OK on a different license. If the license is currently GPL3 and you want to re-license to Apache - good luck with that.
and those who have Windows definitely have Quicktime installed.
Quicktime on Windows is a steaming turd along with its redheaded stepchild iTunes. I definitely don't have it installed. If you can't be bothered to use a 21st century cross platform container format I'll gladly skip watching your video.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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.
Some people have priorities beyond people being able to read their website, too.
I thought a website was a way to communicate with people -- a service provided to them. Turns out I'm wrong. Turns out a website is a way of attempting to browbeat people into using hardware that some shadowy collection of self-appointed watchmen have judged pure enough for their tastes.
And?
Wikimedia is concerned (IIRC) with building a library of content that freely accessible and sharable in perpetuity, I'd say that mission trumps catering to current-gen device users. How many hours per day did you say you spent watching wikimedia videos on your phone? 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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You are obviously not one of the people who needs to work with these videos, but I'm still interested in learning which "21st century cross platform container format" you would recommend, that anyone and their uncle is able to open (without calling me on the phone first).
I don't like QT much either, but what else can play back ProRes and H264, move frame-by-frame (including backwards), and display timecode and frame numbers?
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
WebM is certainly better than QuickTime's H.264 encoding quality. That's VP8 with Vorbis audio in an MKV container.
Oddly enough, your best bet for playback is to use the <video> tag to embed it in a web page. Both Firefox and Chrome natively support WebM, as of quite a while back. Internet Explorer never will, but their market share is dwindling, and all those users need for playback is to install the codec pack first: https://tools.google.com/dlpag...
If you want to keep it on QuickTime, there are QT components to support WebM, though I can't speak to their quality: https://code.google.com/p/webm...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Freedom is letting people use what codecs they want, not forcing them to use a handful of really terrible ones.
Compromise is not always the correct solution, though it is often depicted as the politically correct one.
While 1995 was a more benign time, today's state sponsored patent and copyright wars, extensions, and lawsuits suggest that the LPF was correct with their uncompromising stance.
Turns out a website is a way of attempting to browbeat people into using hardware that some shadowy collection of self-appointed watchmen have judged pure enough for their tastes.
The same could be said of closed source licensors and their behavior towards users who desire some control over their hardware.
My phone has a hardware VP8 encoder/decoder. Since the hardware design is free for chip designers and most of them have promised to make VP8 or VP9 standard there should be no problem going forward.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The Nexus 5 has built-in VP8 hardware support for both decode and encode.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
All major ARM chipset manufacturers have committed to including the VP9 hardware codec. My Nexus 5 already has the VP8. Soon even the $40 tablet will have it. The license is free, the hardware design is free, so there should be no problem including this high-value IP.
These new hardware partners include ARM, Broadcom, Intel, LG, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Panasonic, Philips, Qualcomm, RealTek, Samsung, Sigma, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba.
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...
Stop bothering us with your facts.
I want this account deleted.
The first issue can be solved by re-encoding the video on the Wikipedia side, a'la youtube.
Just use MP4. That is the standard container for H264 AVC. If you want something fancy use MKV. MKV support is required in order for a video decoder to have the DivX logo on it so even standalone players usually support it. Quicktime is awful. Not the container format but the player software. Like the other guy said its a steaming pile of crap. Especially on Windows.
This was precisely one of the options of the poll, which was voted against (only about 10% of support).
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'
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.