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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.
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Freedom isn't free.
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.
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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.
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I'm not sure which codec you're referring too, so I can't answer you there.
I guess my optimism is based on WebM being an open format, thus allowing anyone to implement it on any future platform. Unlike various proprietary formats, that won't. I mean, does your 'phone support Intel Indeo or RealPlayer G2?
That's really odd, because the benchmarks I've seen show VP8 & h264 to be evenly matched, and no one has produced a finished h.265 or VP9 codec, so I do wonder how you think you've seen those two codecs fairly benchmarked?
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