Thank you for your suggestion.

Moving to MediaWiki product, as this is not related to the Commons configuration but to the files handling source code.

TMH issue. There are already open bugs for things like ALAC (bug 32104) but I don't see any MP3 one's.

Just a note to say that user Wywin as submitted a GSoC proposal related to this report:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Wywin/mediaConvert

Note that the Wikimedia Multimedia team started a community RFC, which decided that this would not be done for MP4 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video).

MP3 is not the same format, but they are similar patent-wise.

(In reply to Matthew Flaschen from comment #4)

Note that the Wikimedia Multimedia team started a community RFC, which
decided that this would not be done for MP4
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video).

MP3 is not the same format, but they are similar patent-wise.

To be fair, the predominant result of the rfc was not to output mp4 formatted files. Ingest, then auto-convert and throw away the original is a little less clear cut, although possibly still against the rfc.

mdale wrote:

Current thinking is that mp3 patents will expire 2017:
http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_MP3_MPEG-2_H_264/

So "just" 3 more years ...

Thanks, Bawolff.

(In reply to Bawolff (Brian Wolff) from comment #5)

To be fair, the predominant result of the rfc was not to output mp4
formatted files. Ingest, then auto-convert and throw away the original is a
little less clear cut, although possibly still against the rfc.

A minority of participants in the rfc didn't want us to host proprietary files, or didn't want us to run transcoding software that required proprietary codecs, on WM servers.

However passing a proprietary-format file to the Internet Archive, having them convert it, and uploading the resulting .ogg file seems amenable to all parties.