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Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Multimedia and Commons/Upload and instant conversion of mpeg and avi etc

< Community Wishlist Survey 2017‎ | Multimedia and Commons

Upload and instant conversion of mpeg and avi etc

  • Problem: As per Commons:Commons:File types: "Patent-encumbered file formats are not accepted at Wikimedia Commons... Examples of patent-encumbered file formats are AAC, WMA, MPEG and most AVI codecs. Our mission requires content to be freely redistributable to all. Patent-encumbered formats fail to meet this standard."
    Yet these are popular file types, and the outright refusal of Wikimedia to receive such files impedes the growth of the project.
  • Who would benefit: All projects and viewers.
  • Proposed solution: Have a built-in converter instantly turn such file uploads into an open format.
  • More comments:

DiscussionEdit

  • Video2Commons does that. Yann (talk) 15:34, 9 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    • I guess that one could be improved a lot: It encodes to WebM with old VP8 and Vorbis. We could readily use the much-improved formats VP9 and Opus. It doesn't directly encode the files for all the different quality levels. They are reencoded on Commons, once again, because there's no integration. When sourcing from YouTube, it will reencode (lossy) instead of using their WebM file(s) directly. It doesn't even recycle their Opus audio tracks. So it doesn't even check if the files it's fed are already in the right format. Does it keep the original file around for later reencoding? Quality loss, loss, loss.--Reseletti (talk) 17:33, 9 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    • (Somebody should task a bot with replacing all those video files that this tool reencoded out of YouTube videos with YouTube's WebM files directly out of youtube-dl).--Reseletti (talk) 19:25, 9 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    • Videoconvert (by User:Prolineserver) does that too, with thousands of videos uploaded since 2014. See also one user's recent comparison of these two and other tools, pointing out various usability issues. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 00:49, 18 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • This is particularly important for mobile users--it's possible to upload still images from a phone, but there's no automated MP4 conversion which can allow uploading videos from a phone, so you have to download to a computer, encode using ffmpeg or the like, and re-upload, which is significantly more complex. Grendelkhan (talk) 23:30, 9 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • There's some history here to keep in mind. 😂 (talk) 00:13, 10 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • We used to have this feature in UploadWizard, relying on the Firefogg extension for Firefox, but that is no longer possible since Firefox removed support for it. We have phab:T157319 about implementing a replacement, I'll link that to this wish. Matma Rex (talk) 16:34, 13 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • It seems to me that this would first require the community to change their consensus on NOT permitting the WMF to work on this option, as noted in the RFC linked to by User:😂-emoji —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:36, 15 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]

VotingEdit

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