[Commons-l] default quality for ogg content?

[Michael Dale]

Once we ship the firefogg extension support for the uploading videos; 
commons should request that users select the highest quality source 
video footage available ie the HD video their camera captured or DV 
original edited footage from their local computer and then commons will 
supply the transcode settings.  

I think it would be good if we wrote up some documentation to explain 
this to uploaders... any volunteers to help on that front?

Presently for the firefogg upload support I have arbitrarily chosen 400 
pixels wide with keep-aspect ratio and 500kbs bitrate.

Firefogg could let us request multiple encodes or profiles from the user.

Should we plan on supporting multiple "profiles" ie multiple quality 
settings? Ie one version at around 320 wide 300kbs for low bandwidth / 
resolution environments, cell phones etc (300kbs should be "acceptable 
quality" once the new Thusnelda theora encoder lands).

We could additionally read the source file resolution that users provide 
and choose a "maximum quality preservation version" we could probably 
even ship the Dirac codec with firefogg (Dirac is a high quality at high 
resolution wavelate codec for more on dirac see your favorite info source ;)

If we want to support multiple quality settings for a single "stream" 
this will require a bit more infrastructure. Specifically I propose we 
add another namespace for temporal media called Stream: and have it 
directly map to ROE xml something like: http://tinyurl.com/72x57r  more 
info on ROE http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/ROE

File:my_movie_low_quality.ogg and File:my_movie_high_quality.ogg would 
soft redirect to Stream:my_movie and all the meta info would be stored 
there. The Stream namespace also allows us to group other media tracks 
that share a temporal meaning such as multiple language audio dubbing 
and multilingual transcripts/ subtitles. The javascript player can then 
dynamically select audio language and or subtitles based on the user 
language.

Stream namespace could also store "mirrors" or point to "torrents" 
improving syndication and bandwith cost distribution for high traffic HD 
content ie (Miro could read the ROE file and grab the torrent rather 
than hit our servers) and or a Firefox torrent extension could be 
detected by our javascript player and choose the torrent over hitting 
our servers for the HD content.

Not to say all these things will happen at once ... just pointing out 
the need for a new namespace to group idential temporal meaning files.

--michael