Wikipedia breaks the tie, adopts Theora Codec

Whenever I read the term freedom of open or free knowledge, the first thing that comes to my mind is Wikipedia. It is a non-profit organization, is no doubt the biggest source of knowledge, featuring milllions of articles and provides you with probably everything you need to know, for free. But it does lack one important content type, Video. And now, the open video alliance has recently announced a project to support Videos on Wikipedia.

The idea behing this project is to enable a better communication through videos. A good example presented in this blog on Miro.

Think about the difference in reading about a cheetah's top speeds and actually seeing it run.

The developers of Miro are working on a free tool to convert videos to Theora, its in testing phase, will be out soon. The video conversion will be a part of the 5 steps of this: how to post a video on Wikipedia.

Benefits to the open source society

• In case it struck anyone of you, that in this upcoming era of HTML5, Wikipedia should be supporting HTML5 video tag rather than flash. Well, it is and by selecting Theora, it "strikes another blow for freedom"(the first blow being "adding the video support" ). Thanks to the amazing commitment of Wikimedia Foundation towards open information tools and formats.
• Since, the preview of IE9, opensource world has been a little worried about the future of Theora videos. But this decision of wikipedia to use Theora as the codec has brought smiles back on the faces of opensource enthusiasts. And ofcourse our tally of H.264 vs Theora stands now 4-3. Go Theora!!! 

So, since they are using Theora codec, you will have no problem in viewing videos in Firefox, Opera and Chrome, browsers which support Theora. And for other browsers, which supports proprietary H.264, you will be presented with a Java based player.

There is a nice gallery of videos that are being submitted to wikipedia on this Wikipedia Miro community site. Now, you can see what people are posting.

Some negative aspects of wikipedia supporting videos

Now, in spite of all the good things here, many people have shown their concern about this decision of Wikipedia to support videos.

• Wikipedia is a non-profit organisation, which relies on donations to pay the bills. The overheads will probably go through the roof after it starts supporting videos.
• Wiki is simple and fast, videos will just clog and slow it down.
• Why not embed youtube or vimeo videos. th will probably sponsor wikipedia for this.

Since, wikipedia who has refused to put any ads on it and asks for donations to pay his bills, let's hope things won't turn bad when it starts supporting vidoes.