Wikipedia jumps on Ogg Theora wagon

Wikipedia, the largest online encyclopedia decided that it would now support the upload of the open-source Ogg Theora format for video to its website. The announcement was made by Wikimedia Deputy Dir. Erik Moller, in an interview with Beet.tv where he also discussed opening up video on the web and the support they’re getting from Mozilla. The interview:

Full transcript.

Wikipedia plans to support server-side Ogg transcoding later this year through the FireOgg plugin for FF.
Apart from FireFox 3.5 which already supports natively playing Ogg files, Opera and Chrome will also add include such capabilites. Microsoft (IE) and Apple (Safari) seem to not care about this open source undertaking by Mozilla, Google and Opera; but then again Microsoft has always been a few steps behind. News of Safari not supporting Ogg is reportedly causing outrage among the Apple OSS fans.

Erik Moller said in the past that Wikipedia is preparing the launch of a new player for Ogg with fullscreen support.
Unlike proprietary formats, Ogg can be downloaded from the browser with a couple of clicks. Online tests show that the open-source format outperforms Flash (Adobe) and is comparable in quality with H.264 (it looks sharper to me) – tests at comparable bitrates.

Over the years Wikipedia has been on the open-source wagon and it continues to do so, promoting this new feature of HTML5 and FF implementation. With this endeavor  they plan to help bring video back to the web, just like images are now.