[Commons-l] Ogg Theora is too hard to play. We need YouTube-style Flash streaming video.

Fri Sep 29 04:12:35 UTC 2006

I'm an outspoken fan of fixing and improving Theora, and I think this
sounds like a fantastic idea.  We should do similar low-res versions
of audio into something other than .ogg -- but make sure that the
high-res version we archive and strongly encourage is, in both cases,
the free-format Ogg version.

There is *no* widely-used completely free audio or video format.  We
should not allow our strong support for Ogg to prevent our media from
being used by the overwhelming proportion of our audience that cannot
(or don't know how to) play those formats.

At the same time, we should use our extra free-format-friendly
energies to promote those formats, educate our audience about how to
play them, develop and host instruction manuals and documents to help
with that last point, and regularly survey users to find out how many
of them can and do play free format media... to know, for instance,
when we can start deprecating in-browser flash in favor of in-browser
theora plugins.

Oh, yes -- and we can push the Mozilla Foundation to integrate ogg
players into the default firefox distribution.  <pokes MozFound about
writing in libtheora support>

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Firefox_Ogg_Support

-- SJ

On 9/28/06, Jason Spiro <jasonspiro2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Click this link: http://www.openwetware.org/wiki/SynBERC:MIT/Lab_video_tours
>
> It's far different from most video on Commons: it's Flash streaming
> video and it works in 99% of web browsers. (The VLC web browser plugin
> is supoosed to support Flash video too, though I've never tried it.
> Also I don't know if Flash video is based on patented codecs or not.
> But assuming that no such problems come up...) Perhaps we should put
> in a MediaWiki feature request:
>
> MediaWiki should convert all our videos to low-rez Flash Video format
> for streaming previewing as soon as the .ogg original is uploaded.
> This way, more people will be able to view our videos, so we'll get
> more uploads.
>
> Agree or disagree?
>
> Cheers,
> Jason
>
> --
> Jason Spiro: computer consulting with a smile.
> I also provide training and spyware removal services for homes and businesses.
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-- 
++SJ