[Foundation-l] Alternative approach for better video support

Mon Jul 23 11:15:34 UTC 2007

Hoi,
I have the idea that you are making projecting issues of the GPL on the
GFDL. The GPL insists that you have to provide source code. As far as I can
see, the GFDL does not. This is reasonable because a book can be published
on paper under the GFDL. It is not necessary to provide a digital version as
well.
Thanks,
     GerardM

On 7/23/07, Daniel Arnold <arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> At first let me point out that I appreciate the hard work of people that
> want
> to improve our projects. Please let us acknowledge the work of Erik, even
> if
> you think like me that his proposal is _definitely_ not the way to go.
> It's
> all about AGF. ;-) So please let us brainstorm how to turn this into a
> good
> opportunity for all of us without sacrificing parts of our goals and
> independence.
>
> Two different things were not made clear in Eriks proposal and
> consequently
> were mixed in follow up mails:
> a) Allowed media formats for _uploading_ files.
> b) Provided media formats for _downloading_ files.
>
> Allowing Flash Video for _upload_ is not acceptable in our projects for
> the
> named reasons of patent problems and (at least partly) proprietary
> software.
>
> Providing Flash Video additionally for _download_ does not conflict with
> the
> GFDL or whatever (as you provide along side this copy as well a free
> format
> copy of the same content). This is as well the reason why e.g. providing
> TomeRaider _downloads_ of Wikipedia is in agreement with our understanding
> of
> digital freedom.
>
> As pointed out by various people providing Flash Video for download means
> transcoding. As all relevant video formats are lossy you cannot transcode
> Ogg-Theora to let's say Mpeg (or any other particular codec used by Flash
> Video) without quality loss.
>
> So Flash Video is a nice to have _second class_ alternative - a mere
> convenience for our users. But who wants to get the best quality will
> always
> use the original OGG-Theora files.
>
> Philosophy aside here an analysis of current technical problems:
>
> 1. Wikimedia Commons badly needs a download service for the whole media
> file
> repository.
> 2. The media repository of Comons is so overwhelmingly large that it would
> need a lot of bandwith and download time even with broad band internet
> access.
> 3. Audio and Video streaming requires a lot of bandwith but it doesn't
> require
> sophisticated CPU intensive database queries and special designed software
> (aka MediaWiki).
> 4. Many organisations especially universities (I could name you at least
> one
> concrete example) want to support us with technical infrastructure but it
> is
> very complicated to integrate these kind donations into our technical
> infrastructure. Thus we are wasting a lot of donation potential beside
> money.
>
> Proposed solution:
>
> 1. We provide an Rsync download of our media files for selected third
> party
> mirror servers. Rsync is specifically designed for such a purpose and is
> exeptionally bandwith saving on mirroring files where parts are constantly
> changing.
> 2. These selected third party mirrors are collected in a
> Round-Robin-Queue.
> Everytime a user directly wants to download the original file (and not a
> thumbnail, preview or the image page in the wiki) in Wikipedia (or another
> Wikimedia project) he is being redirected to this very file on a mirror
> out
> of this queue and downloads it there as usual via HTTP (just the download
> link changes, he even won't realise in most cases that he has been
> redirected
> for this download).
> 3. In case mirrors don't want to host the whole database we could provide
> them
> some filters for mirroring, e.g. Ogg files only. Ogg mirroring would make
> the
> most benefit for our infrastructure and audio/video streaming, as full
> images
> are downloaded relatively seldom.
>
> This would make all these things possible:
> * Download of Wikimedia Commons media database via mirrors.
> * Saves us quite some bandwith especially at audio and video (you need to
> download the real file for streaming).
> * Easy drop in and drop out of single third party supporters.
> * Not dependent from one exclusive partner. We maintain our independence
> and
> increase technical failure resitance by reducing the single point of
> failure
> problem.
>
> In case you fear the problem of license issues (providing the copyright
> infos
> alongside the files) this can be solved without troubles, too. There is
> static.wikipedia.org Just transfer the static html image wiki pages of
> Commons as well to the single mirrors and we're perfectly done (and third
> party mirrors can create their own software interface around that thing if
> they want).
>
> Cheers, Arnomane
>
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>