User:JWSchmidt/Blog/20 July 2007

I've been spending some time learning how to make computer generated videos (see The nanoepitaxy of Susanne Marie, Rendering models of living organisms). I've been hoping that Wikimedia wiki projects would soon have a player that would allow videos to play from within wiki pages (I'd like a video on the new main page, for example).

New Foundation discussion thread
We should permit Flash video playback

Quote #1
"The Internet Archive currently does not transcode to Ogg Theora, but....They have recently started embedding the Flash-based open source Flow Player"

Quote #2
"The Internet Archive currently does not transcode to Ogg Theora, but has a transcoding pipeline in place for other codecs. They have recently started embedding the Flash-based open source "Flow Player" for playing back FLV files directly in the browser, and have added FLV to their transcoding pipeline."

Quote #3
"The Archive is happy to support us with video hosting in any way....they would also be willing to add Ogg Theora to their transcoding pipeline."

Comment
This (above) sounds like it could be a quick path to getting video play in wiki webpages.

Quote #4
"add video support to MediaWiki that will, as intelligently as possible, fall back to any of the following methods
 * embedded open source Flash player [see above]
 * Java player
 * VLC plugin
 * (in the future) support ....and....
 * support the open source Flash project Gnash ."

Conclusions
All these options seem like a distracting maze. Can't we just get one working ASAP?

Example of the Internet Archive's embed player. Not good enough resolution for screen-casting.

Fluendo/Cortado
We can now use the Fluendo player on Wikiversity pages. The OggHandler extension also allows you to switch from the default Cortado JAVA-based player to QuickTime player (Mozilla or Safari) or the VLC player (IE or Mozilla).

So far, I've found two of my ogg videos that have a problem playing in the default JAVA-based player. The first ogg below plays, but has sound problems for me under some OS/browser configurations. 

