Removing foundation-l from CC because we're talking more about tech than
foundation policy now. Gregory, thanks for adding your considerable
expertise to this debate. It is much appreciated.
Gregory Maxwell:
Windows also does not support SVG natively, IE renders
PNG with
transparency wrong (at least I think it still does). There was also a
time when Windows included no support for MP3. Windows 2000 didn't
ship with an MPEG4 codec, and I don't think that XP does either
(although it will happily download one).
Yes, these are all good points. It would be interesting to know what
formats _are_ supported natively by Windows XP. We might also want to
talk to the video experts from the Internet Archive and Ourmedia about
their experiences with accessibility. These are non-profits with a
record of promoting the public good.
Looking around on Internet Archive, I do not see Theora, but I do see
files with the "MP4" extension, which the file command identifies as
"ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, version 1". Is that an open wrapper format
for MPEG streams?
If you want mostly painless universial support for
Windows users, what
you should be arguing for is a java Wikipedia player (which is
certantly possible).
Also an interesting suggestion. Do you know a Java-based implementation
which would support Theora, and which would run out of the box in
Internet Explorer on XP? If it doesn't exist, perhaps it might make
sense for the Foundation to fund development, if it seeks to take an
active role in promoting Theora and Vorbis.
And the mediawiki code that Wikipedia usually runs is
labeled 'beta'.
Can you point out any discussion about bugs in Theora?
I'm not aware of their bugtracking database, but their own FAQ seems to
be fairly clear on what they mean by "Alpha":
http://www.theora.org/theorafaq.html#31
"'Alpha' code is strictly for internal development only, which is to
say, 'No one sees this code, it's not even close to being done yet.' At
the
Xiph.org Foundation, we release everything we do so that people can
help us move the codebase forward by reporting bugs and submitting
patches. So, even 'Alpha' code needs to get out to the world."
I've personally had troubles getting Theora to work with mplayer, but it
does seem to work fine with xine.
that we've
had many reports of problems with playback
of both Theora and Vorbis,
To where? They aren't arriving in mass in OTRS.
Grepping my IRC logs, I see many complaints about crashes, lack of docs
and lack of wide support, from various notable people, but it would
violate Freenode policy to post these. If you have logs as well, I
suggest grepping -i for "theora".
The two incidents I remember most vividly are the problems during
Wikimania to play back the little documentary that was made about the
public domain (if we can't even make it work at our own conferences, we
can hardly expect the average Windows user to do so), and our
discussions on Wikinews when David Vasquez was working on a Wikinews TV
version.
We haven't even managed to get all of the mp3
files off of english
Wikipedia yet and they've been forbidden for a long time now, so I
can't see how your proposed change would accomplish anything except
forcing our users to use patent encumbered formats.
I do see a risk that the dual policy might be violated too easily.
Perhaps a simple hack that "filename.<proprietary format>" is not
allowed if "filename.ogg" does not also exist would be sufficient. Yes,
it could still be violated, but that would then be much more obvious and
malicious.
Also, as the single largest uploader of original music
recordings
(although it's still a pretty limited number because the annoyance of
copyright issues on music is keeping me from uploading hundreds of
tracks), I'd like to also voice another objection: I strongly oppose
the use of the content I've created to promote patent encumbered
formats.
I understand. Believe me, I'd love to see more mainstream support for
Theora and Vorbis. Perhaps we can brainstorm a bit about how to make
this happen. I like the Java player idea.
The RIFF wrapper used for most of the microsoft
formats is a
multiformat wrapper (Just like OGG) and can happily be coerced into
containing executable code (unlike OGG).
Do you have some useful background links on the topic of executable code
within wrapper formats?
'Mode widely used' is a broken argument by
itself. If we were going
for most widely used, for revision controlled text we'd be using
Microsoft Word rather than Wikitext.
Well, that's not a very fair comparison, since at least there are
feature-complete open source encoder and decoder implementations of the
codecs in question. According to Wikipedia, there's also debate about
whether the patents are actually enforcable, at least in the EU.
Erik