Comments on: Wikipedia gears up for flood of video and photo files

New hardware needed to support online reference service's push for more media.

[paul.saulnier]

Sounds very exciting, and it's good to see that Wikipedia still has plans to do totally new things. I do like how Rafe calls them out on supporting only Firefox 3.1, however. I'm curious as to why this is even necessary, since video support will likely be provided through Flash or some other plugin that should be easy to run on any browser.

[Eric Draven]

The article actually says, "Vibber told me the new video support is being designed first to run in Firefox 3.1". I agree it was the right thing to call them out, but WikiMedia didn't say they'll support Firefox ONLY, but with Firefox as the primary design point due to Ogg Theora native support.

[Mr. Dee]

I just can't visualize Wikipedia making certain topics into videos. The sexual topics come to mind first. Will we see a couple having sex on the 'Intercourse' page and other more taboo topics that children can easily encounter?

[3rdalbum]

@Mr Dee: Were you thinking of something like the school scene in Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life?

It does sound exciting. I'd like to see Wikipedia ONLY use Ogg Theora for video, as it might provide a reason for Microsoft and Apple to support Theora as a video standard. It would be trivially easy for them and wouldn't cost them anything in licensing fees.

[David Gerard]

This article could have done with more research or the right questions being asked at the time rather than as asides in the article after the fact.

Wikimedia only has Ogg Vorbis sound and Ogg Theora video because every other codec is patented up the wazoo. But it's presently #8 site on Alexa and #4 on ComScore, so basically it's up to Apple, Nokia etc. to catch up with sites their users want to use.

Presently, *anyone* can play the Ogg files - the site has a Java applet which plays them in any browser supporting Java, which is all of them. Java's open source itself, by the way. It's just that Firefox 3.1 - and Opera - will play them natively in the browser itself.

[faboumen]

While I agree that addition of more photos is good, video is not. The third world is still having a terrible time coming up to speed with the internet, and video will kill it. Even if you have fast internet, wikipedia's servers are so slow now, they are about to get a whole lot slower. All this new hardware is going to require more cyberbegging, for what videos that 3/4 of the world can't access?