Wikimedia considers supporting H.264 to boost accessibility, content

Foundation believes that WebM, Theora mandate is stifling content creation.

Ars Staff – Jan 16, 2014 6:10 pm | 95

The Wikimedia Foundation is considering the use of H.264 video, in spite of its patent and license encumbrances, in an attempt to increase the amount of free educational video content it can offer.

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to “collect and develop the world’s knowledge and to make it available to everyone for free, for any purpose.” Being free, both of cost and of onerous license restrictions, is one of the foundation’s guiding principles.

However, this principle is causing problems when it comes to video. At the moment, the Wikimedia Commons, a repository of over 19 million free-to-use educational media files, has only 38,000 video files. The Commons currently requires videos to use either the Ogg Theora or WebM compression algorithms, as both are freely licensed and hence consistent with Wikimedia’s founding principles.

The Foundation regards this low number of videos as problematic—YouTube, by comparison, has more than 6.5 million educational videos—and its multimedia team believes that the inability to use the H.264 codec is a causal factor. Today’s cameras and smartphones can almost universally produce H.264 video; support for other codecs is much less common. Similarly, tools for editing and manipulating H.264 video are abundant; WebM and Theora generally require additional tools, plugins, or conversions.

The team is also concerned that the use of WebM and Theora limits accessibility of its videos, with smartphone and tablet-based browsers broadly unable to play them. H.264 has no such problem.

The Wikimedia multimedia team has created a request for comment to discuss the issue and to enable users to express their support or opposition to the plan. The RfC will be open until February 14, but it already appears to be divided along the expected lines: half oppose the change for predominantly ideological reasons—H.264 isn’t free—half support it, generally for pragmatic ones—H.264 video is easier to produce and play.

Wikimedia is, of course, not the first freedom-motivated organization that has run into this issue. Mozilla long resisted including H.264 support in its browser because of H.264’s patent licensing requirements: developers of software and hardware that can play or create H.264 video need to pay license fees. The browser developer had to reconsider this stance, however, amid practical considerations.

In many ways, the reasons for Mozilla’s change of heart are the same things that are compelling the Wikimedia Foundation to consider using H.264. The video producing and playing world is largely built around H.264. Mobile devices, to take full advantage of their built-in hardware acceleration—essential for optimizing battery life—need to support H.264, and so software running on mobile devices likewise needs to support H.264. Mozilla’s smartphone platform, Firefox OS, thus made H.264 support non-negotiable.

For Firefox and Firefox OS, the decision to support H.264 was sweetened somewhat by the fact that Mozilla itself didn’t need to pay any license fees. Instead, the software can defer to support provided by the underlying operating system or hardware, or where that’s not possible, it can use binary modules donated by Cisco.