I would like to announce that some of the new media features are now available in gadget form on Wikimedia Commons and the English Wikipedia. These include a new ogg player, the add media wizard, and firefogg upload support. I hope having these components in gadget form will enable some more testing and feedback :)

Getting Started to enable these components you must turn on the mwEmbed gadget. You can turn it on by visiting your preferences page. Once you enable the gadget you should shift reload to ensure you have a fresh copy of the JavaScript. (note you will need to enable the gadget for each wiki you want to test (ie both for wikimedia commons and Wikipedia). Once enabled you can check out the following features: (more…)

Theora 1.1 has been released

Theora 1.1 has been released. This release reflects the efforts of xiph.org developers who over the past year have done incredible work to greatly improve the core free codec video library. This effort has been support by Mozilla Foundation, Red Hat and others. These improvements include:

Chris Blizzard from Mozilla has a detailed blog post about the improvements and what they mean for open video creators, distributors and viewers. Wikimedia foundation makes exclusive use free/open formats and has been a long time supporter of ogg theora and makes use of the free codec in its websites. Wikimedia also helped organize some improvements by administrating a theora improvement grant from Mozilla earlier this year.

Also a new version of ffmpeg2thora has been released using this new codebase making it easy to take advantage of these new features. If you would like to give the new encoder a spin you try it out with the web based firefogg encoding app.