Requests for comment: MP4 Video | Hacker News Reader

Requests for comment: MP4 Video

commons.wikimedia.org

46 pointsmmcclure20 comments

Ok I will be the one nagging here.MP4 you usaually refer to the Containerformat specified in MPEG-4 Part 12 and Part 14.My prof was so strict about that MP4 is not a videoformat, I still have nigthmares from the MP4 analysis... (There is a Box in a Box in a Box and you have to describe each and every property). Sorry for the inconvenience

tl;dr: because iOS.

It's not just iOS. It's PITA to upload videos to Commons for an ordinary person. It's a legitimate problem. That said, list of unsupported _free_ formats: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:UNSUPPORTED No 3D, no raw, no CSV, no HDRi, no JPEG2000 (widely used by archives), etc. Or even H.261, its patents probably expired already, and it's widely used by various archives. But very little happens in these directions.

Safari and Internet Explorer only support H.264. Chrome, Android browser and Firefox support H.264 (FF on Linux & Windows IIRC).

H.264 doesn't just get to iOS devices. It's the only way to make sure your web video shows on ~98% of all devices.

a question; on all the platforms you cited, you may switch to the right browser to see open video formats. i'm curious on ios, can you do it? (i mean chrome and other browsers on ios can they run non-h264 codecs?)

There is a VLC for iOS, but if you want efficient hardware accelerated video playback (which you do on a battery powered device), you'll have to settle for mp4 and the built-in CoreMedia framework. As a bonus it will also play seamlessly in the system browser and any apps with a native UIWebView component.

So coming to my question, since vlc isn't a browser, on iOS it is impossible to support a browser which can play web videos using non-proprietary formats as it appears. Sad.

Not just iOS. Almost all devices these days have hardware encoding/decoding for h.264. Webm and ogg just don't have that level of penetration. From strictly an experience standpoint (disregarding the politics of it all), h.264 will give users a better experience pretty much across the board. All of nvidia’s kepler-class GPUs have dedicated h.264 hardware. Both Intel and AMD have GPU accelerated solutions for h.264.

For ogg and webm, not so much. I think it's smart that wikipedia is discussing moving to this, as it'll make it more accessible.

I think this is a fantastic idea for Wikipedia. There have been tons of times I've wanted to watch a video or listen to an audio recording on Wikipedia, only to have it completely fail to work correctly on my device.

To me, it couldn't be more of a win-win: increased access and prominence of video content on Wikipedia, but everything is also available or mastered in an unencumbered format.

I just don't see how offering an alternative format makes Wikipedia "less free" like the majority of editors seem to believe.

Why not webm?

You might find the lengthy discussion in the linked article answers your question.

To summarize: 1. Millions of visitors can't view WebM 2. Most of the video created today is H.264

thanks for the tl;dr summary, I may give the full discussion a try.

WebM is a dead format. Although it purports to be patent free, it has very little support and may have exactly the same problems as H.264 with respect to patents.

It earns a "nice try" from Google, but not a passing grade. It's no PNG.

a bit late, vendors are now working on implementing the next version h.265 (better quality, much smaller size)

H265 has a smaller adoption base than even WebM. If we're talking about that league anyway, then maybe Daala is competitive. They claim that it is better than H265.

Daala is years away from being usable, never mind achieving widespread adoption. It is not competing with H265, it's competing with whatever comes after H265.

Different codecs are on different timelines, but unless H.266 comes much faster than previous iterations, then Daala will be competing with H.265.

Wikipedia Commons has overriding concerns, such as spread and availability (including licensing) of codecs. H.265 isn't meeting those bars yet.

yet it will take quite a massive amount of time for implementation. For the next 4 years h264 will stay the dominant force in video, simply because of the backlog of only-h264-capable devices.

What 'd be cool is if mobile/laptop/desktop vendors would start sticking FPGAs on the boards to allow for dynamic updates of video decode cores.

Wrong goal. Wikimedia is looking for a video format that reaches most users now, not one that will probably reach many users a few years from now.

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