bigmammoth - Slashdot User

Submission + - Wikimedia commnity debates H.264 support on Wikipedia sites.

Submitted by bigmammoth on Thursday January 16, 2014 @06:31PM

bigmammoth writes: Wikimedia has been a long time supporter of royalty free formats, but is now considering a shift in their position. From the RfC
To support the MP4 standard as a complement to the open formats now used on our sites, it has been proposed that videos be automatically transcoded and stored in both open and MP4 formats on our sites, as soon as they are uploaded or viewed by users. The unencumbered WebM and Ogg versions would remain our primary reference for platforms that support them. But the MP4 versions would enable many mobile and desktop users who cannot view these unencumbered video files to watch them in MP4 format.

This has stirred a heated debate within the Wikimedia community as to whether the mp4 / h.264 format should be supported. Many wikimedia regulars have weign in, resulting in currently an even split between adding the h.264 support or not. The request for comment is open to all users of Wikimedia including the broader community of readers. What do you think about supporting h.264 on Wikimedia sites ?

Submission + - Wikmedia and BitTorrent Video Distribution Trails (wikimedia.org)

Submitted by bigmammoth on Monday September 27, 2010 @08:15PM

bigmammoth writes: One potential problem with campaigns and programs to increase video on Wikimedia sites is that video is many times more costly to distribute than text and images. The P2P-Next consortium has created an HTML5 streaming BitTorrent browser add-on to try and help experiment with ways to reduce the costs of video distribution. As described in a Wikimedia tech blog post, once the SwamPlayer add-on is installed, and when using the multimedia beta, video on the site will be streamed via the hybrid HTTP / BitTorrent SwarmPlayer. For smooth playback the Swarmplayer downloads high priority pieces over http while getting low priority bits from the BitTorrent swarm. The same technology is available for experimentation with any site via the stand alone version of the Kaltura HTML5 Media library

Submission + - Theora ahead of h.264 in objective PSNR quality (metavid.org) 1

Submitted by

bigmammoth

on Thursday May 07, 2009 @02:12PM

bigmammoth writes: "Xiph hackers have been hard at work improving the theora codec over the past year with the latest versions gaining on and passing h.264 in objective PSNR quality measurements. From the update:
Amusingly, it also shows test versions of Thusnelda pulling *ahead* of h264 in terms of objective quality as bitrate increases. It's important to note that PSNR is an objective measure that does not exactly represent perceived quality, and PSNR measurements have always been especially kind to Theora. This is also data from a single clip. That said, it's clear that the gap in the fundamental infrastructure has closed substantially before the task of detailed subjective tuning has begun in earnest.

Momentum is building with a major Open Video Conference in June, the impeding launch of Firefox 3.5 and excitement about wider adoption in a top 4 web site. It's looking like free video codecs may posed a seriously threat to h.264 bait and switch plan to start charging millions for internet streaming of h.264 in 2010."

Submission + - C-SPAN: Liberating & Restricting Floor Footage

Submitted by

bigmammoth

on Tuesday December 26, 2006 @06:30PM

bigmammoth writes: "C-SPAN bid to "liberate" the House and Senate floor footage has re-emerged and been shot down. In an aim to build support a recent New York Times editorial called for reality TV for congress. But what is missing from this editorial is the issue of privatization and the subsequent restriction of meaningful access to these media assets. Currently the US government produces this floor footage and it is public domain. This enables projects such as metavid to publicly archive these media assets in high quality ogg theora using all open source software guaranteeing freely reusable access to both the archive and all the media assets. In contrast C-SPAN's view only online offerings disappear into their pay for access archive after two weeks and are then subject to many restrictions.
If C-SPAN succeeds reusable access to floor footage will be lost and sites such as metavid will be forced to stop archiving. Because of C-SPAN's zealous IP enforcement metavid has already been forced to take down all of already "liberated" committee hearings which are C-SPAN produced. Fortunately, the house leadership sees private cameras as a loss of "dignity and decorum" and will be denying C-SPANS request"

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