Internet Archive to remove some "derived" video formats
by wcca - November 27, 2008 10:40am
As we noted three weeks ago, the Internet Archive is changing the videos it “derives” from the original videos uploaded to the site.
Here’s the official news. In short, they are now making Ogg Theora derivatives, and continuing to make higher-quality MPEG-4 videos.
There are also changes in the way thumbnails work.
They’ll be deleting derived FLV videos, and the lower-quality MPEG-4 videos they used to derive. This is annoying, as there are presumably many pages out there linking to the old MPEG4s. (The existence of the FLVs was downplayed, so they’re not such a problem.)
Here at WCCA, we need to change the “content type” (Drupal jargon) of our older video posts anyway, so this doesn’t make much more work for us. Others may not be so lucky.
By the way, the Embedded Media Field plugin for archive.org should already work great under this new system. We’ll be keeping an eye out for any problems.