Video header: Support free formats like .webm/vp8 and .ogv/theora

[fnadde42]

It seems like the theme do not support free formats like webm or ogv. This concerns me as the web should use open standards and not closed ones. Content wise, WordPress supports the use of both mp4 and webm to provide broader support of browsers and it seems like the same practice should be applied here. As I'm not a great programmer I will just create this ticket as a suggestion.

[westonruter]

@fnadde42 thanks for the report. The problem with these formats is that they are not supported by all browsers. I believe that H.264 via MP4/MOV is supported by all browsers. Even if WordPress supported these additional open video formats then the user would be forced to do transcoding of the videos and upload each one and select each one in the video header to use in some kind of multi-media selection control, as WordPress cannot do the transcoding of the videos on its own.

More details about this are in #38172.

[fnadde42]

I think the choice to transcode the video to several formats should be a choice of the user. I'm more worried that we are not giving people who don't want to use closed standards and closed code an option here.

Our freedom is at stake and Wordpress of all platforms, which is free software, should know the importance not to build in closed standards in the web (like the DRM in HTML5). I fear that the web will slowly but surely closed down and what used to be the user controlling the program will be the program controlling the user.

This is not an issue of emergency but of principal. Even though most people (probably unknowingly) uses H.264, we can't take away our choice of being free and using morally compatible software. This is also a reason why I like Wordpress so much.

EDIT: As written in the thread you linked

The baseline recommended requirements for video hosting we've operated with for the past year are:

1. Cross-browser support through OGG and MP4 (and in some cases WebM)
2. Dynamic scaling based on bandwidth, screen width, and screen resolution
3. Dynamic streaming based on current active viewport

[celloexpressions]

Support for other formats should theoretically work, with a few adjustments potentially needed to validation. We should look into how the video shortcode works (it was created before a single format worked cross-browser). I'm not sure that explicit support with UI makes since for core but if we can start with a plugin for that and see how it goes, that would make it easier to consider.