Battlestar Wiki talk:Think Tank/Video Ext

• Date Started: Thursday, March 8, 2007 at 12:00 (UTC)
• Date Ending: Thursday, March 15, 2007 at 12:00 (UTC)

Instructions: Use {{Support}}, {{Oppose}}, {{Abstain}}, and {{Neutral}}, supported by a reason and appropriately signed using the four tildes (~~~~).

Other users are encouraged to vote as well, simply use {{vote}} to add your vote. Refer to Template:Vote for complete instructions.

1. Joe Beaudoin Jr. - Support As Serenity said, we should be careful to not overload pages with video content. But this would be great to have for some pages, such as the Season 3 gag reel and the BSG Rap. -- Joe Beaudoin ^{So say we all - Donate} 23:46, 21 April 2007 (CDT)
2. CalculatinAvatar - Abstain. Automatic leave of absence due to inactivity.
3. Day - Abstain. Automatic leave of absence due to inactivity.
4. FrankieG - Support With the caveat that a strict policy should be developed for where, how and when to use video.
5. Mercifull - Support I wrote it... so yes. hehe --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 10:28, 8 March 2007 (CST)
6. Peter Farago - Oppose. We should not mingle advertising with site content. It should be perfectly adequate to serve video files in some industry standard format such as MPEG-4. --Peter Farago 21:42, 8 March 2007 (CST)
   • Comment - FLV is becoming more and more popular on the internet and can be viewed by 97.3% of Web browsers (according to independant analysts) and its probably even higher now with the popularity of Youtube and Google video. Many large traditional media websites such as Scifi.com, the BBC and Reuters are increasingly using the format as it enables easy streaming for a large number of people with nothing new to download or install unlike mpeg or avi files with various compression codecs. You can embed a flv movie with no extra plugins needed and protect it from people stealing the file to use on their own sites without permission. embedding flash is also compliant with w3c unlike the code used to make other videos work in all browsers. Its my personal opinion that this gives us maximum flexability to show video to the users of the wiki while getting income as compensation for the costs in providing it. Ads only appear on rollover and at the end and are only in text form. --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 03:31, 9 March 2007 (CST)
     • Comment The advertising experience is obnoxious and unnecessary - videos should be presented in roughly the same way that we currently present still images. My point about separation of advertising from content stands. The user-base advantages you cite for FLV are valid, but the fact remains that it is not an open standard. Playback issues on Linux are abundant, and while the Mac version of the Flash player has recently improved to useable performance levels, the poor maintainence history on that platform should not be quickly forgotten. Additionally, the dearth of freely available authoring tools compared to other formats should be taken very seriously. --Peter Farago 11:45, 9 March 2007 (CST)
       • Comment I know FLV is not an open standard (I'm for open standards myself as well), but FLVs play well on Linux these days. I run Linux myself, and Firefox plays YouTube videos quite happily. --Catrope^{(Talk to me or e-mail me)} 15:56, 21 April 2007 (CDT)
7. Serenity - Support Oh, somehow missed this, so I'm late. I'm not to keen in video ads, but flash videos could enhance some articles. We just need be careful that they are well chosen and not overused. --Serenity 16:01, 21 April 2007 (CDT)
8. Shane - Support Shane ^{(T - C - E)} 09:53, 8 March 2007 (CST)
9. Spencerian - Neutral. Anything that improves the content of the wiki is good. Anything that detracts from an article's factual objectives (including the distracting nature of some video, Flash and other animations) is bad. Anything that taxes the overall objectives to provide a fast wiki is also bad. We just got this server system up to some power. Use video, but carefully. And what are we going to host? Copyright concerns? --Spencerian 23:52, 21 April 2007 (CDT)
10. Steelviper -
11. Talos -
12. Catrope - Support. I know the voting is officially over, but the project is still not implemented AFAIK. Also, very few votes have been cast.

Comment Please vote! We need more votes!

Hosting of flv files

We will need to work out where the files will actually be hosted. I have tested the extension using a /flv file uploaded directly to the Battlestar wiki server as well as pulling files direct from Google and YouTube. We will need to check the terms of service for G/Y if we intend to use that option to ensure that we are within the rules to do this. --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 10:30, 8 March 2007 (CST)

I have to see if I can get it the mediawiki upload system to upload certain types of files to a certain directory. I'll explore that right now really quick. Shane ^{(T - C - E)} 10:34, 8 March 2007 (CST)

If you upload flv files to the image namespace then whats the point in using advrite? people would just go direct to the source thereby using up our bandwidth and we wont get revenue. --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 12:56, 8 March 2007 (CST)

I think he was just proposing hosting them on the server, not necessarily "exposing" them to viewing without going through your extension/AdBrite. --Steelviper 13:22, 8 March 2007 (CST)

Oh right. The ideal solution is via G or Y tho. Because they have an infrastructure to stream and convert videos into flv format. --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 16:37, 8 March 2007 (CST)

Minor modification

I belive Shane was saying that the extension can be modified slightly to give a credit in the Special:Version page. I was hoping he would be able to claify this a little more? --Mercifull ^{(Talk/Contribs)} 07:21, 30 April 2007 (CDT)