Also Wikimedia Commons' Media of the Day: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
There's WebM, VP9 in various resolutions, and... MJPEG ?
Setting aside the oddity of serving a 95-year-old cartoon in full HD, that's still an odd selection of codecs. Everything up to MPEG-4 ASP (XviD etc.) has already been patent-expired. There's also MP3 there, so why not an MPEG-2 (H.262), MPEG-1, or even H.261 encode?
The reality is, these things were captured on film, and there's no reason you can't scan the film in high definition resolutions. Film is an analogue medium whose upper bound for resolution is dictated by the film stock and grain; 35mm film is sufficient to produce modern 4K scans and was one of the most common stocks in analogue video production.
If anything, modern 1080p/2160p scans of old film bring the material much closer to how people with projectors originally saw the media, instead of a blurry scaled down version made for old television.
If I may provide my favorite example, check out Wizard of Oz in 4K. It's from 1939, in full color, and holds up wonderfully well. The 4K transfer allows you to really appreciate the set design and makeup especially.
For Motion JPEG a recent config change ( https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/operations/mediawiki-config... ) indicates:
> Recent versions of iOS can play back suitably packaged VP9 video and Opus or MP3 audio, with a Motion-JPEG low-res fallback for older devices.
So I guess it is there for back compatibility :)
Transcoding is expensive but not that much, if my company doesn’t make 1/20 of Wikipedia and we can afford to do 1000s of hours a day of transcoding surely they can too.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/W...
Why would they spend money on improvements to the site when they could spend money on other things instead?
Wikipedia has one of the best SRE teams, they were pretty transparent too, a lot of the communication was on IRC channels you could see, at least that was the case few years back.
Running the top 5 website in the world is no joke especially as a non-profit and they do it well. They haven’t had any down time or major incident in the last decade which is pretty impressive.
I would think their SRE team is not just good but also very motivated in the mission otherwise they would leave for much higher paying jobs, infra jobs are very lucrative if you have prior experience at more scale not much more scale than Wikipedia .
e.g. there was a pretty strong consensus about not supporting MP4 back when the WMF asked whether it should be allowed, mostly on "it's not free" grounds: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comm...
Also note that VP8/VP9 is still patented, but just licensed freely. IMHO that's less free than patent-expired (public domain).
Firefox can support mp4 over h264 despite their clear FOSS aligned goals , I am surprised that Wikipedia whose goals more align to open information rather than open source directly has challenges .