14 DAY TRIAL // Wikipedia has been working on video support for years now, but the rumors about an impending launch are intensifying. And now, Erik Moller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, is saying that the new feature is coming very soon in the coming months, and that there are already some pages with video content enabled.
The technology has been in the works for several years now, but, after the announcement that the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, had partnered with open source video provider and platform Kaltura, things remained quiet. Last month, some new information began to surface, like the sources for most of the videos and the tools that users would be provided with to make it easy to upload a video.
Moller told Beer.TV in an interview more details about the technical side of the project and especially the reason behind using the open source video codec Ogg Theora and its audio counterpart Vorbis, and not the more popular H.264 video codec. Wikipedia is a strong backer of open Internet technologies and, while the license-encumbered H.264, coupled with MP3 for audio, for example, may give slightly better performance and quality, providing users with tools that require no proprietary codecs or applications was deemed more important and in keeping with the philosophy behind the site.
In order to keep the solution completely non-proprietary, the site will also be using the <video> and <audio> tags from the proposed HTML 5 standard, and not Adobe Flash or other solutions. This has been made possible now that Firefox 3.5 offers full support for all of the technologies in the proposed standard with other browsers, like Chrome and Opera, also implementing some of the features with full support coming soon.
With the browsers ready, a powerful video player with full-screen support and other advanced features based on the <video> tag will be coming later this year to Wikipedia, along with the possibility to add your own videos to entries.