Hi,
I've been working on recording and uploading video to Commons lately,
and I'm wondering what to do with the original files that my camera
recorded (in a proprietary format unfortunately).
So, is WebM/VP8 suitable for long-term archival? Or does it make sense
to backup the original files for use later down the road?
-- Legoktm
In the next couple weeks I'm planning to start switching our video
transcode output from WebM VP8/Vorbis to the newer WebM VP9/Opus profile,
which saves us about 38% on file size and bandwidth while retaining the
same quality.
This will not affect what kinds of files you upload; only the scaled
transcoded output files used for playback will change. All modern browsers
that support VP8 support VP9 as well, and our player shim for Safari and IE
will continue to work.
All the details:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TimedMediaHandler/VP9_transition
Comments and questions welcome!
-- brion
<tl;dr>: Read https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/Mentors and
add your name to the mentors table and start tagging #GCI-2018 tasks.
We'll need MANY mentors and MANY tasks, otherwise we cannot make it.
Google Code-in is an annual contest for 13-17 year old students. It
will take place from Oct23 to Dec13. It's not only about coding:
we also need tasks about design, docs, outreach/research, QA.
Last year, 300 students worked on 760 tasks supported by 51 mentors.
For some achievements from last round, see
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/03/20/wikimedia-google-code-in-2017/
While we wait whether Wikimedia will get accepted:
* You have small, self-contained bugs you'd like to see fixed?
* Your documentation needs specific improvements?
* Your user interface has some smaller design issues?
* Your Outreachy/Summer of Code project welcomes small tweaks?
* You'd enjoy helping someone port your template to Lua?
* Your gadget code uses some deprecated API calls?
* You have tasks in mind that welcome some research?
Note that "beginner tasks" (e.g. "Set up Vagrant") and generic
tasks are very welcome (like "Choose and fix 2 PHP7 issues from
the list in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120336" style).
We also have more than 400 unassigned open #easy tasks listed:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/HCyOonSbFn.z/#R
Can you mentor some of those tasks in your area?
Please take a moment to find / update [Phabricator etc.] tasks in your
project(s) which would take an experienced contributor 2-3 hours. Read
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/Mentors
, ask if you have any questions, and add your name to
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/2018#List_of_Wikimedia_mentors
(If you have mentored before and have a good overview of our
infrastructure: We also need more organization admins! See
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/Admins )
Thanks (as we cannot run this without your help),
andre
--
Andre Klapper | ak-47(a)gmx.net
https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
Due to a bug in refactoring the extension setup
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T202208> for TimedMediaHandler, MP4
video uploads were accidentally enabled from about August 1 until today.
The bug was that file extensions were added to the enabled list twice, but
'mp4' removed only once, leaving the doubled copy in the enabled list.
Fix was to only add the set once; this was deployed a few minutes ago. An
AbuseFilter rule was also put in place over the weekend to prevent further
uploads.
There are a few dozen affected files on Commons and possibly various local
sites. We've deployed the fix which has re-disabled MP4, and I'll do a scan
for remaining files later today and either put them on the delete queue or
replace them with WebM versions.
Task: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T202208
-- brion
why is it that the excellent player is available on the standard wikipedia
view, and not on mobile view? is this just my configuration? as eyample:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_orbit
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_orbit
the effect is that my mobile can play the standard view video, but not the
mobile view video.
rupert
Thanks to all people involved,
I just read about this new video format in the making/released [0].
Of course, I am not asking to support this, as this seems like the future,
and not the present, but being a complete noob on video formats and codecs,
I would like to know if someone more knolegeble has some insight about this
and if it is something to keep in mind/someone has tested it and has
experiences to share/client and vendor support?
--
Jaime
[0] <url:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/07/11/royalty-free-web-video-codecs/>
On Fri, Jun 29, 2018 at 6:46 PM, Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Awesome sauce. Thanks Moritz!
>
> -- brion
>
> On Fri, Jun 29, 2018 at 7:39 AM Moritz Muehlenhoff <
> mmuhlenhoff(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > On Thu, Jun 28, 2018 at 01:54:18PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > > Current state on this:
> > >
> > > * still hoping to deploy the libvpx+ffmpeg backport first so we start
> > with
> > > best performance; Moritz made a start on libvpx but we still have to
> > > resolve ffmpeg (possibly by patching 3.2 instead of updating all the
> way
> > to
> > > 3.4)
> >
> > I've completed this today. We now have a separate repository component
> > for stretch-wikimedia (named component/vp9) which includes ffmpeg 3.2.10
> > (thus allowing us to follow the ffmpeg security updates released in
> Debian
> > with a local rebuild) with backported row-mt support and linked against
> > libvpx 1.7.0.
> >
> > I tested re-encoding
> >
> > https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_of_Death_-_
> Pitts_Todeswand_2017_-_Jagath_Perera.webm
> > (which is a nice fast-paced test file) from VP8 to VP9, which results in
> > a size reduction from 48M to 31M.
> >
> > When using eight CPU cores on one of our video scaler servers, enabling
> > row-mt
> > gives a significant performance boost; encoding time went down from 5:31
> > mins
> > to 3:36 mins.
> >
> > All the details can be found at
> > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T190333#4324995
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Moritz
>
Inspired by everybody's awesome work getting the 3D extension live, I spent
some time yesterday making some tweaks, including working with Hashar to
get continuous integration testing working for the 3d2png tool. :)
Review on the patches would be welcome!
3d2png:
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/413182/ - fix for test on node 7+
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/413183/ - fix for test loading files
before they're completely written
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/413184/ - update reference rendering
to match current code
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/413277/ - fix for Linux to run 'npm
test' internals through xvfb-run, add mesa libs to debian package
description
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/413344/ - cleaner error throw in case
GL doesn't initialize
Hashar has already merged the configuration changes to CI and confirmed it
now runs correctly with these patches in; we can take it out of
experimental mode once these are merged.
I also noticed that upload.wikimedia.org serves the .stl files
uncompressed; gzipping would cut bandwidth usage and thus transfer time
approximately in half.
Patch to main puppet config which I think will resolve this:
* https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/413236/ - apply gzip for
application/sla files
-- brion
US patents on MPEG-2 video compression expired recently, so I took a stab
at a patch adding support for uploading .mpeg/.mpg files containing
MPEG-1/2 material:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/411051/https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T166024
I expect this to be most useful for importing old videos from scientific
papers and web sites (small files), and for archival footage from GLAM
institutions such as digitizations of old SD broadcasts and tips of modern
HD broadcasts (large files) -- importing the original files would avoid
recompression artifacts and save time and effort re-encoding.
A couple concerns and thoughts:
* Most browsers don't display MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 natively, so playback is
completely reliant on the WebM transcodes.
* Small files as found on scientific open access papers seem to import
fine. These would no longer have to be pre-converted to Ogg or WebM before
upload.
* Archival footage from broadcast etc might use MPEG-2 codec but a
different stream format (MPEG-TS) -- if working with GLAMs to get existing
footage, we might need to do more work for processing them. Should
investigate this if there is interest.
* MPEG-2 is the format used for DVDs. Piracy might be a concern, but the
large file size and complex file layout of full length movies may be a
hedge against drive by uploads.
* There are still patents open in the Philippines and Malaysia:
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/M2/Pages/PatentList.aspx -- do we need
to wait for these or is the US patent expiration enough?
-- brion