[Foundation-l] Why don't we re-encode proprietary formats as Ogg?

Mon Jun 8 11:28:58 UTC 2009

[cc'd back to wikitech-l]

2009/6/8 Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>:

> It's been discussed since OggHandler was invented in 2007, and I've
> always been in favour of it. But the code hasn't materialised, despite
> a Google Summer of Code project come and gone that was meant to
> implement a transcoding queue. The transcoding queue project was meant
> to allow transformations in quality and size, but it would also allow
> format changes without much trouble.

Ahhh, that's fantastic, so it is just a Simple Matter of Programming :-D

(I'm tempted to bodge something together myself, despite my low
opinion of my own coding abilities ;-) )

Start simple. "Upload your phone and camera video files! We'll
transcode them into Theora and store them." Pick suitable (tweakable)
defaults. Get it doing that one job. Then we can think about
size/quality transformations later. Sound like a vague plan?

Bottlenecks: 1. CPU to transcode with. 2. Disk space for queued video.

- d.