Talk:Video policy/Archive 1

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Couldn't most video needs be best served by w:SVG? It's small, shows a concise view of just what is needed, can include w:Vorbis sound, and is easily editable.


For future reference, this link to the Library of Congress has some terrific movies, a decent number of which we can use. -Kingturtle


The US National Atomic Museum has many valuable (if depressing) videos in MPEG format. -Aarchiba


A source of lots of videos of exactly the sort that Wikipedia wants is consumer digital cameras: for example, I have a handful of 5-second 320x200 clips of en:Wing Chun exercises I took with my digital camera. Of course, good quality is needed (and these particular ones aren't great) but it's worth thinking about. -Aarchiba


Will Theora support automated low-quality versions? It shouldn't be any more difficult to get a low-resolution version of a video than it should be to get a thumbnail version of an image. Likewise, maybe there should be an image attached to the video, not necessarily the first frame but some representative frame. I suppose there's probably no automated way of doing this.

Furthermore, is there even a standard for what's considered a good size for video? Is high-quality video 640x480? It's probably too early to be discussing this sort of thing in any case, but some day HDTV's going to be standard, and then where will we be? You can always downsample; upsampling is harder... Grendelkhan 21:05, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

FreeCache[edit]

http://www.archive.org/web/freecache.php

Interesting idea, a couple of problems with it:
  • It does place a dependancy on an external site (though presumably it wouldn't be that hard to set up MediaWiki to turn inserting FreeCache URL's on and off at will).
  • I'm not sure that people running FreeCache would run big enough caches to keep enough Wikimedia content in them to significantly knock Wikimedia's bandwidth bill down. --136.186.1.117 05:44, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

First, I don't understand why in every discussion about media on Wikimedia projects people start worrying about porn. This won't be a problem and a porn policy should be extremely simple - when porn media helps build an encyclopedia, the media stays, when it doesn't, it gets deleted.

Second, I don't think we should be worrying about hours of DVD-quality video at the moment. Since we can only use public domain and original videos made by contributors (the pool of available GFDL and CC files is probably rather small, smaller than with images), and since editing video (even simple conversion, trimming, etc.) is more time-consuming than editing photos, we don't have to worry about large amounts of materials. When this becomes a problem, the costs of diskspace and bandwidth will surely drop further, easying the burden on Wikimedia.

I think that the policy should be targeted more at careful experimentation with adding multimedia content than at thinking longterm about what would we like in a perfect future world. Paranoid 15:44, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Video intensive wikibook[edit]

Just as a potentially useful datapoint, on http://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/Langue_des_signes_française we are working on a wikibook on French Sign Language. This has the potential to be highly video intensive (not neccesarily, there's a lot we can do with still images) given exercises and what not.

New developments in video for the new year.[edit]

The year has turned, and there is a new codec shootout from doom9.org. The Slashdot discussion brings up some interesting points. There has been no additional discussion here since the Commons opened, and while the Commons has video listed as an acceptable media type, there's no new policy there. I feel that there have been some new developments which justify revisiting the question of video.

To summarize: while en:MPEG-4 based codecs such as en:XviD have improved, there has also been development on non-encumbered codecs. Consider two wavelet-based codecs: the BBC's en:Dirac, and the recently developed Snow (quicker summary; it's reportedly better than Dirac, but still in the early stages).

Is it time to pick a codec, or set of codecs? To start writing video authoring guidelines? Has the hour finally come? Do we even have a good list of requirements for what a proposed codec should be capable of? I welcome discussion. Grendelkhan 13:04, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The options (feel free to add more) are:

XviD[edit]

Pros

  • Relatively widespread. Will play even on many set-top boxes.
  • Mature.

Cons

  • Patent-encumbered by MPEG, and thus unsuitable for use in Wikimedia projects.

Dirac[edit]

Pros

  • Free and open.
  • Backed by the BBC.
  • Next-generation wavelet technology.

Cons

  • Not very widely supported yet.

Snow[edit]

Pros

  • Has the potential for impressive quality at very low bitrates, even better than Dirac.

Cons

  • Very early alpha.
  • Unoptimized---requires enormous CPU capacity to decode, even more to encode.

Weird bug in this page[edit]

I was just starting to learn how to edit Wiki, so I picked the first typo I saw to fix, which was on this page

I can't. Ei yei yei, it's a weird browser-specific bug.

The paragraph "However, en:bandwidth costs are another issue entirely. I know very little about the economics of buying bandwidth, but I'm sure Jimbo can comment here. I strongly suspect that this might be a distinctly nontrivial cost if we are too cavalier about video." displays properly with a few extra words attached. But without this extra material, the material in quotes reads:

However, en:bandwidth costs are another issue entirely. I know very little about the economics of buying bandwidth, but I'm sure Jimbo can comment here. I strongly suspect that this might be a distinctly nontrivial cost if we are too cavalier about video.

For me this bottom version (MacOS9, IE 5) reads "...I (linebreak) sure Jimbo can comment..."

Deleting I'm fixes it. Putting any word in the place of I'm, even "zzz", breaks it the same way.

I went back and tried Netscape 4.75, and this text displays just fine in the original - no bugs at all. Maybe that should serve as a lesson...

I have no idea what's the matter, but it seems like a pervasive bug; I remember seeing little "divots" taken out of Wikipedia text in other places that were similar.

Sorry if this is the wrong place to put this!

Mike

Status?[edit]

I was considering creating some short video clips for the Wikipedia from recordings I made some years ago in Iceland (e.g. the famous waterfall Detifoss or the old Norröna ferry, you get a better impression of them with video clips), but now I'm not sure whether Wikimedia projects are ready for video... it seems there aren't any clips yet? Commons at least has only categories "Images" and "Sound" in its Category:MediaType, no "Video". Would it be appropriate to just start uploading and creating a category for them? I think I would prefer a MPEG format, however, 'cause most people will have problems with the exotic free formats; after all, we're using JPEG for images - which also had patent issues. Gestumblindi 22:54, 9 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There is at least one video in wikipedia that I am aware of: w:Image:Theater commercial, Warner's corsets, 1910s.ogg. It is using the w:Theora codec that is completely free plus the quality is good. People who can not install the codec (for whatever reason) can still see the video using the Cortado Applet Player, although Wikipedia is not configured to use it yet. You may want to use ffmpeg2theora for conversion.--Hhielscher 04:07, 11 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]