[Advocacy] Re: Spread Open Media dot Org Update

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 7/17/07, Cameron Parkins <cameronparkins at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jon has a great point - the lack of available plugins for Open Formats on an
> open-platform such as Wordpress is both mildly ironic and frustrating for
> the "mildly-above-average" user (of which I consider myself). I know very
> little about modifying the php for plugins and thus I find the idea of going
> in and modifying actual code quite intimidating.

There will soon be an official MediaWiki extension for Ogg file
support live and in-use on the WikiMedia wikis (i.e. Wikipedia).

http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/OggHandler/

It would be useful to us if some folks would install it and give it a
shot. Right now it has a dependency on having a build of ffmpeg with
theora enabled, but I hope we get around to removing that need.

This extension builds off the player detection work that Maik Merten
did with me for the current beta video player used on Wikipedia.

It supports autodetected Theora video and vorbis audio playback using:

*HTML5 <video/> tag. (tested in the Opera 9.5 beta)
*<object/> tag based video (works with totem plugin, mplayer plugin,
and XiphQT).
*Java using Cortado.
*VLC plugin.

A hacky version of this same approach has been in use on Wikipedia for
many months now. The system is able to play video for about 3/4 users
who attempt to use it. (Using Java for the majority of the users).

I expect that once some browsers have been shipping with native Theora
support this player will be functional for a greater numbers of users.

There is still substantial room for improvement: The infrastructure
doesn't support transcoding to provide multiple bandwidth options.
Cortado has a number of annoying bugs related to buffering.  But all
in all it's pretty good.

Of course, this only directly helps sites using MediaWiki but the
functionally could be a template for others to use in providing
similar support.

*Successful* open formats are important for the mission and strategy
of the Wikimedia Foundation. Obviously, I'd like to stay informed
about the progress in any initiatives to improve the penetration of
playback and authoring tools for open formats.