Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 June 5

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June 5

mp4 video download

wikipedia should make all the video in mp4 format.so we can view the video in mp4 format.and it should make the function as like as google. . .is it possible to make it like google where we can get any things on wikipedia like google. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Samir.khanal63 (talk • contribs) 09:40, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Wikiupedia is an online encyclopaedia. Google is a search engine. They are two entirely different things, for entirely different purposes. If you want something like Google, use Google or another search engine. As for video formats, I'll let someone else explain the details, though I think that we currently do it the way we do mostly for reasons of accessibility. AndyTheGrump (talk) 10:04, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

MPEG4 video formats are patent protected. Wikimedia projects have traditionally avoided using patent-encumbered technologies, to protect the free rights of our users to create, edit, view, and re-use Wikimedia content without having to pay royalties or being limited in what they do by their licensing restrictions. Thus, for video, Wikimedia projects including Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia only support the unencumbered Ogg Theora and WebM formats. Playback support for these is extremely common, and players for them can be installed on just about every platform, mostly for free (for iOS, it seems to cost money to install Theora or WebM support). A request for comment discussion was undertaken last year to consider adding support for MP4; the idea was rejected - you can read that lengthy discussion for much more of the pros and cons, and the underlying legal, philosophical, and technical issues. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 11:35, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

I don't have a modern iOS device to confirm it (somebody help me out here) but VLC for iOS should play WebM and Theora fine. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 11:53, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

WikiLinks, a zero-cost application, is also able to play video and audio in the formats that Wikipedia uses.

iOS devices - like most modern mobile, tablet, and desktop computer form-factor hardware - provide hardware accelerated support for the playback of H.264 encoded video. This video compression technology is more "fuel efficient" - it outperforms Ogg by nearly every metric of quality and bitrate. It also requires less energy (less battery!) than Ogg for playback. iOS software that plays Ogg-format video and audio necessarily uses software implementations - which are significantly less efficient than hardware-accelerated decoders. The very same statement is probably true for nearly all other modern computer technologies, whether they are competitive mobile devices that run other operating systems, or if they are more conventional computer systems with modern Intel CPUs.

As a private individual, I have sent numerous impassioned pleas to the technical directors at Wikimedia Foundation asking why they choose not to use H.264 video on Wikipedia. This format is not encumbered by patents that pertain to these purposes; and there is (almost surely) no need for Wikipedia or its users to pay any royalty fee[1] to anybody for this category of use. I have asked Wikimedia Foundation to direct their attorneys to evaluate these statements and licensing terms independently. I have asked their technical teams to evaluate implementation effort, which I believe would be quite small. I have directed attention to projects like ffmpeg, which includes a free software implementation of H.264 encoding, decoding, and transcoding.

Regrettably, I have never received a response indicating that the Wikimedia Foundation has any desire to use (or investigate using) H.264 technology on Wikipedia. The paranoid conspiracy theorist in me tends to believe that there is some game afoot. Perhaps I have been in correspondence with the wrong people who are not in a position to make such decisions. I am open to suggestions.

Nimur (talk) 16:44, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

A 2014 Wikimedia Commons 'Request for Comment' was closed with a reported consensus, "no MP4 support." Nimur (talk) 21:53, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

The RFC was already linked by Finlay McWalter above. And this basically answers your question. While the foundation has sometimes gone against the communities wishes, it generally hasn't worked well and has required that those in charge feel strongly enough about the issue that they can be convinced to do so. So as long as there is such strong community feeling against H.264, I think it will be difficult to convince people at the WMF that they should implement it and go against the communities wishes, particularly since the lack of hardware decoding aside, it's only really iOS and to a lesser extent Safari and Internet Explorer which don't provide support for VP8. (Incidently, while I agree with the quality issue, I'm unconvinced that power usage is definitely higher on h264 where both provide hardware decoding support. It will likely depend on the bitrate and power efficiency of the hardware decoding implementation.) Nil Einne (talk) 04:28, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

search for series of pictures

How can I search the Internet for a series of pictures if I only know one part of it? For example. For this spicy Artist exists a whole series of pictures with a blue ball[2]. All of them taken at the same day in the same session. But only some of them are in general use. People say there might be a significant amount of pictures from other angles. Uknowhattamean?

Or this example [3] by the same burning hot Lady. I guess there are many more pictures with this on naked body painted leggings. Tineye does not provide a websearch like this as far as I know. --178.12.122.74 (talk) 17:42, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Jeff Koons was the photographer for the Lady Gaga blue ball Artpop photo shoot. It shouldn't be very difficult to use a search engine and locate results for "Jeff Koons Lady Gaga blue ball photo shoot." 209.149.115.214 (talk) 19:07, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Is there a method to find the pictures in cases the photographer is not known? --178.12.122.74 (talk) 19:37, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Reverse image search with google or tineye. I couldn't find anything new for the first and I found new poses for the second (not sure if they were fake).

images.google.com
click the camera icon, click Upload an image
Sleigh (talk) 07:17, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Google search seems to me better than tineye. Indeed it can search similar pictures. [4]

By the way why is this woman this kind of beautiful? And from where comes her massive amount of energy? How can this be by the law of physics? Is there a scientific or a mathematical or thermodynamical explanation? 178.12.122.74 (talk) 10:52, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

Tex files compression

What is the most efficient way to compress 900,000 ~30KB text files? 82.44.55.214 (talk) 17:46, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Use the Total Commander. There is a large set of methods. I guess it is the zip with level 9. 178.12.122.74 (talk) 17:50, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

yes. Total commander/file/pack/zip/configure +level9

You can choose many options like using recursive folders, all seperately or together etc. 178.12.122.74 (talk) 17:53, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Standard zip files are limited to 4GB. 82.44.55.214 (talk) 18:29, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Just use 7-Zip. —SGA314 (talk) 18:46, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

By efficient do you mean smallest file size? You could try ZPAQ, or 7-Zip's PPMd. They are both very slow (I'd guesstimate that compressing 27 GB would take about a day). -- BenRG (talk) 18:59, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

IIRC I found less than that for about 4 millions files with total data size over 100 GB on 7-zip PPMd, so 900k 27GB may be faster depending on the computer. Incidently, while my data was mostly HTML plus images and other stuff with a lot of duplicates, I found 7-zip LZMA2 (with a decent dictionary size, say at least 128MB although I think even quite a bit less then that still was better) actually outperformed PPMd despite the later's general superiority with text files. LZMA2 is a bit slower, particularly with 2 threads (4 threads is somewhat faster but will decrease compression. I'm assuming Ultra compression here, with faster or whatever even 2 threads will decrease compression.) Z-PAQ even with it's deduping engine came in between (even with method 59 or something) PPMd and LZMA2. Z-PAQ deduping (well probably any deduping) + 7-zip LZMA2 compression was actually best of all. Nil Einne (talk) 04:38, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

If you're interested in efficiently compressing a large number of small-ish files, you may want to use a compression format with solid compression support. Some multi-file formats like zip start over with each file, so can't take advantage of any redundancy/compressibility that happens between files. Formats which support solid compression compress all the files as a single unit, so can typically achieve better compression for multiple similar files. The drawback is that it typically becomes much slower to extract a single file from the archive, as you have to effectively decompress the rest of the files before you can extract the file. (That's slightly inaccurate, but gets the gist of the reason.) -- 160.129.138.186 (talk) 20:17, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Error "See Also" Rendering

When loading the page on Linus's Law, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus's_Law, at a width of 1300 pixels the link to "List of eponymous laws" moves to the second column of the See Also section when I attempt to click on it. It defaults as the third element in the first column. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.90.107.53 (talk) 18:06, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

Known issue, see See Also/Unordered List HTML Element Styling issue. Also see here, it's apparently something caused by Chrome. RegistryKey^(RegEdit) 07:10, 6 June 2015 (UTC)