[hashar]

Because despite Wikipedia and sister projects being one of the largest web property, it is running on a thin budget and has starved engineering resources. As far as I know, the transcode code is maintained by a single employee (possibly as a side gig / on top of everything else) and the assistance of a volunteer.

For Motion JPEG a recent config change ( https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/operations/mediawiki-config... ) indicates:

> Recent versions of iOS can play back suitably packaged VP9 video and Opus or MP3 audio, with a Motion-JPEG low-res fallback for older devices.

So I guess it is there for back compatibility :)

[mod50ack]

The problem is not resources. It is an ideological choice. Wikimedia Commons only supports non-proprietary file formats. That means either open formats or formats whose patents have expired. (MPEG-4 Part 2 patents only expired in the US a few weeks ago.)

[manquer]

Why though ? They spend $160M a year [1] and grew their cash reserves by 50% year on year in 2023, so not particularly running in an operating deficit environment.

Transcoding is expensive but not that much, if my company doesn’t make 1/20 of Wikipedia and we can afford to do 1000s of hours a day of transcoding surely they can too.

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/W...

[kemayo]

It's not about the cost of transcoding; it's an ideological stance about open / royalty-free formats.

e.g. there was a pretty strong consensus about not supporting MP4 back when the WMF asked whether it should be allowed, mostly on "it's not free" grounds: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comm...

[laverya]

Because in the end every organization is vulnerable to being eaten from the inside and worn as a skinsuit by parasites. Especially charities.

Why would they spend money on improvements to the site when they could spend money on other things instead?

[userbinator]

MPEG-2 or even MPEG-4 ASP seems like a better choice for back-compat.