Free codecs won the Wikipedia vote

The Wikipedia community has finished voting on the use of MP4 videos. With more than twofold superiority, it was decided to abandon support for this proprietary format: 309 votes "against" and 145 votes for full support for MP4 (+4 votes for partial support only for viewing and +56 votes for partial support only for downloading new videos).

Opponents of MP4 explained their point of view. In order to create a truly free product - Wikipedia, to guarantee its complete openness and freedom in the future, you need to use only free codecs. Otherwise, in the future there may be a situation when it will be necessary to obtain a license to use the patent in one form or another to display video on Wikipedia.

From this point of view, any software that is used in the infrastructure of Wikimedia projects must comply with public standards regarding intellectual property, patent status, licensing, and so on.

Current community requirements are that free / open standards should always be used to encode and store video files on servers in order to store data, so that both content and software can be distributed without any restrictions. Branded video containers or codecs, such as MP4, are not allowed on Wikimedia projects, because they are patented and their software cannot be freely licensed (although the content of MP4 itself can be free).