[Wikipedia-l] Re: Theora bitstream frozen...

Tue Jun 22 12:34:46 UTC 2004

On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 01:42:51PM +0530, Arvind Narayanan wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 03:33:44AM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> > Delirium wrote:
> > > Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> > > 
> > >> I think we are now in a position to go ahead and start adding Theora 
> > >> videos to Wikipedia, if anybody has suitable video to add!
> > >
> > > I'm not sure adding videos to Wikipedia in a format that almost nobody 
> > > can play is really the absolute best thing to do, even if it is all 
> > > fuzzy and open source...
> > 
> > The quantification "almost nobody" applies now, but for how much longer? 
> > Ogg Vorbis has taken off quite remarkably. 
> No it hasn't. It is almost unheard of outside the linux world. 

Some comments (to the other replies as well):
* "Almost nobody" does not even apply, since Linux and Windoze players are
available. (Sure, if you don't have the player, you can't play anything. Not
quicktime or even mpeg. A format is useless if there is no player available,
if there is some, the format is useful.)
* ogg streams are far from "unheard", as there are commercial desktop dvd
players as well as mobile players/walkmans playing ogg, apart from the
windows players available since Noah. :) 

> Still,
> I support an open format for music/videos. The effort required to get 
> an ogg plugin for your favorite player is small enough that even if
> someone hasn't heard of ogg before it shouldn't be a big deal.

Yes. And a free project ought to popularise free formats, I believe. As
ogg/vorbis players popped up in the market people started to create
ogg/vorbis sound files (you probably can check on p2p nets around). If there
are players [and encoders] and reason to install those players people going
to install them and the format will be used and known. 

If they're lazy or uneducated to install a player they probably won't miss
much since Wikipedia content is not multimedia oriented, and this may be a
drive to them to educate themselves and install the players. 

Peter