Wikipedia's Assault On Patent-Encumbered Codecs 428
An anonymous reader writes "The Open Video Alliance is launching a campaign today called Let's Get Video on Wikipedia, asking people to create and post videos to Wikipedia articles. (Good, encyclopedia-style videos only!) Because all video must be in patent-free codecs (theora for now), this will make Wikipedia by far the most likely site for an average internet user to have a truly free and open video experience. The campaign seeks to 'strike a blow for freedom' against a wave of h.264 adoption in otherwise open HTML5 video implementations."
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:3, Interesting)
It's all nice and all, but if open video technology really wants to win, they have to be technically better.
New [wikipedia.org] here [microsoft.com]?
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:5, Interesting)
What I'm more worried about is that I cannot watch Wikipedia videos with any other device than my PC. Want to see a video clip of a place you're traveling on your phone? Not possible. Want to see videos from Wikipedia with your PS3/360? Not possible. It will create some serious problems, and I don't think Wikipedia is big enough to push the change alone.
In general I find the "must have hardware support now" argument a bit short sighted. By that reasoning there would never be any change in video codecs. In any case, the PS3 and 360 even combined represent a very small percentage of internet connected devices. And the 360's larger problem is not having a web browser so Wikipedia video would be streamed from your PC anyway and if needs must you can transcode on the fly.
As mobile phones go, my Nokia N900 plays Theora. It also runs Firefox. Fennec [mozilla.com] is on Maemo 5 (the N900's OS) and will soon be available for Android, Windows Mobile, and future MeeGo devices [mozilla.org]. Millions of devices in the field already have the capability to play Ogg Theora and it will only become more trivial to do so with Firefox releases for those platforms.
Dirac (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good luck with that (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair, the format is entirely open, but patent encumbered. Nobody would argue that MP3 is a closed format, for example.
IOW the only challenges are legal challenges (regarding software patents and royalties). They're not proprietary at all.
Re:And... (Score:3, Interesting)
Those supporting Theora argue that, unless Theora is the video codec for the Net, some people (e.g. Linux users in U.S. not willing to break the law) will be restricted from large parts of the Net that will go H.264-only.
It's why Mozilla refuses to just use GStreamer codecs for HTML5 video in mainline builds, for example.
This is counter to Wikipedia (Score:2, Interesting)
First of all, bad headline. This is not Wikipedia's assault; in fact, this will be seen as an assault on Wikipedia, to unduly promote a new product. Most of these additions will be reverted as spam, and the organization from that website will be seen as illegitimate canvassing. A campaign to get anything on Wikipedia is against Wikipedia's policies on neutrality. Now it's true that Wikipedia has a tendency to bend to other free-as-in-speech interests, but those video files are going to draw more attention and ire than the usual debates.
A long lost battle. (Score:3, Interesting)
Give us a real codec.
Linux beats the crap out of Windows.
Firefox beats the crap out of IE.
Vorbis beats the crap out of MP3.
And Theora should beat the crap out of H.264!
But right now it’s a toothless tiger, slow, bad quality/size ratio, outdated technology...
Until that changes, well... frankly nobody in the real world cares for evangelical wars.
And I’m saying that as someone who almost exclusively uses open source software, and is very very happy with it!
I wish I could write codecs. I’t word night shifts to kick H.264s ass. ^^
But hey, as previously said: If Firefox just binds to generic facilities/libraries like ffmpeg, DirectMedia and CoreVideo, the whole discussion goes away, since everybody can choose what to use anyway.
Unfortunately right now they play little dictators, enforcing what they see as “the one true codec” in their holy war.
Maybe I can at least write a patch that creates these bindings.
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:5, Interesting)
Why? Closed formats don't seem to operate under that constraint. In fact, technical qualities seem to be a non-issue as far as success goes in general.
"Its the money, stupid!"
No, not kickbacks, or payola, or licensing fees.
Lets start at the top. Content providers have been banging their head into the bandwidth wall for a decade, starting when the notion of streaming high quality video really took off. Their cost, primarily, is bandwidth. Their product, primarily, is eyeballs. Their revenue, primarily, is advertisers.
To make this work, they need to offer competitive quality in order to maximize the number of eyeballs, and they need to do it with the least bandwidth in order to offer competitive pricing to advertisers.
H.264 was a big improvement over the previous generation of codecs, which finally allowed what might finally be viable online video streaming businesses.
In this case, technically better still matters... its just about the only thing that matters. These businesses don't have the margin to fuck around. If they drop the ball then they lose their shot at #1.
How useful will these videos be? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:HTML5 Video (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that Quicktime and DirectShow don't support theora or vorbis by default, so hopefully Mozilla/Wikipedia/anyone else who cares can get them popular enough that Microsoft and Apple have to finally support some free codecs.
Re:As much as I dislike Wikipedia... (Score:3, Interesting)
.
You could say the same thing about FireFox's challenge to the Microsoft disaster known as Internet Explorer.
Yet FireFox has driven the web towards standards-based web design, instead of Microsoft-based web design.
And Google recoding the videos is little more than the mother of all batch jobs.