* Fabrice Florin wrote: >The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team (1) seeks your guidance on a >proposal to support the MP4 video format. As you know, this digital >video standard is used widely around the world to record, edit and watch >videos on mobile phones, desktop computers and home video devices. It is >also known as H.264/MPEG-4 or AVC. (2)
Actually, "MP4" is a container format and H.264 a video codec, and it is quite normal to use variants of H.264 with other container formats like AVI. Likewise, "MP4" does not imply using AAC as audio codec, MP3 could be used instead, for instance. An analysis why AAC is being proposed may be useful here. >However, MP4 is a patent-encumbered format, and using a proprietary >format would be a departure from our current practice of only supporting >open formats on our sites -- even though the licenses appear to have >acceptable legal terms, with only a small fee required. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=114053933 notes "Though the full license agreements cannot be disclosed in public". That is not very helpful in analysing claims later on like "Merely distributing MP4 files never requires a patent license." What is the exact language to be used to inform anyone handling H.264 video downloaded from Wikimedia Foundation servers of their rights and restrictions, specifically with regards to the relevant patent porfolio? Making it abundantly clear what users can and cannot do with such files should be considered a pre-condition for considering such a proposal. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:[email protected] · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
