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

Mon Jun 8 14:53:32 UTC 2009

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 16:06, Tim Starling<tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> As a technical sidenote, it should be mentioned that recoding a lossy
>> format to another lossy format results _always_ a worse quality output
>> than the source lossy format. The amount of quality loss depends on
>> countless factors and usually do not render the result useless, but
>> the quality difference may be still audible/visible.
>
> But if we can do resizing and quality conversion post-upload, then we
> can encourage users to upload their videos with the best possible
> quality, they won't be forced to upload at a quality suitable for web
> download. We can store the source video unconverted for archival
> purposes. When we reduce the quality of a video for a web user, the

Good in theory, but how many people are prepared to upload videos in
original format? It is most of the time even uncompressed, like DV,
and may add up to even a few gigabytes. (I don't remember, but I
believe it was around a gigabyte per minute or so.)

And it requires an enermous amount of storage space too.

Still I may be completely wrong since I have never checked how long
videos do we possess on average. And naturally this method (that we
convert lossy from original excellnt quality masters) is the best,
since then we control the output format and not the uploader.

-- 
 byte-byte,
    grin