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?
Because despite Wikipedia and sister projects being one of the largest web property, it is running on a thin budget and has starved engineering resources. As far as I know, the transcode code is maintained by a single employee (possibly as a side gig / on top of everything else) and the assistance of a volunteer.
The problem is not resources. It is an ideological choice. Wikimedia Commons only supports non-proprietary file formats. That means either open formats or formats whose patents have expired. (MPEG-4 Part 2 patents only expired in the US a few weeks ago.)
Why though ? They spend $160M a year [1] and grew their cash reserves by 50% year on year in 2023, so not particularly running in an operating deficit environment.
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.
The decision to not supply H.264 is ideological for sure, and I can understand that from the patent perspective, but then they have MP3 (patent-expired in 2017) but not MPEG-2/H.262 (patent-expired in 2018).
Also note that VP8/VP9 is still patented, but just licensed freely. IMHO that's less free than patent-expired (public domain).
My understanding was H264 is kind is licensed freely too after Cisco made their agreement usable for everyone ?
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 .
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 .
I agree that their SRE team is good, well motivated, and transparent. That does not mean that they are the first priority for resources, or that it's the easiest line item to spend on.
People often think that old video must be stuck to standard definition (or worse), because they're used to seeing it on NTSC/PAL broadcasts, VHS, or DVD.
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.
A particular bugbear of mine is when black and white films get scanned and the process somehow introduces a bunch of moiré colour fringes into the digital copy. This feels like something that shouldn't be hard to get right.
Really cool seeing some old music videos that were originally shot in film get the rescan update. I watched Beat It on YouTube the other day and was amazed by the quality.
