Soft launch of ogv.js on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons has begun! This initial deployment covers the desktop view only, so iPhones and iPads won’t get the media player yet in mobile view.
ogv.js provides a JavaScript compatibility shim for Ogg audio and video playback in Safari 6.1 and higher, IE 10/11, and Microsoft Edge browsers, which gets Wikipedia’s media files working in those browsers. (Due to patent licensing concerns, we don’t provide files in the common MP3 or MP4 H.264/AAC formats, and this has made it difficult to use media files reliably across browsers as Apple and Microsoft have not adopted the free Ogg or WebM formats.)
See list of pending fixes for additional improvements that should go out next week, after which I’ll make wider announcements.
Here, have some samples! In Firefox, Chrome, or Opera these will “just work” with native WebM playback, while in Safari/IE/Edge they will “just work” with JavaScript Ogg playback:
Congratulations on the launch! This should make media playback much more accessible for a considerable number of people. If there are statistics on how often ogv.js handles media playback, I guess there should be some pretty numbers in there after a while ;)
Thanks Maik! And thanks for your contributions!
Right now we don’t have good stats for playback (there are some backend stats, but I don’t trust them)… will have to rig up some analytics. I can probably also record playback quality stats that way (late frame / audio count etc)…