Feature request: Choose preferred format

[rdlmda]

I work in a government institution, and there's a nationwide policy for public institutions stating that, where applicable, we should give precedence to Open Source and Free License solutions. That include not only the software per se, but the protocols and file formats as well.

The very reason that made me try your plugin is because our users will be able to upload media files in multiple formats and we can transparently convert them locally to webm or Ogg.

In previous plugin versions, if the user had uploaded a file, the plugin would give preference to it, regardless of the format, even if it was let's say WMV. Since v2.6, there's an option to replace original video file with an H.264 video of the same resolution. That's a really great feature, and sufficient for I suppose 99% of your userbase.

Unfortunately, our institution is in that 1% range, and I'd really, really appreciate if there was a setting where you could chose the new file format to use when replacing the original video. (I know it's uncommon, H264 is sort of becoming standard, but policies are policies, and ours say "no H264, no flash").

[kylegilman]

I think this will take too much time for me to implement. Since Firefox started supporting H.264 I wanted to drop WEBM and OGV encoding altogether but since I had already done the work to incorporate them I didn't feel like it was a good idea to remove functionality. Adding even more support for those formats is not the direction I'm headed.

I'm not sure there's much practical difference between what you're requesting and what you can currently do with the plugin. The WEBM and OGV formats always create a file of the same resolution as your original upload. So if a user uploads a WMV and you encode a WEBM or OGV from it, then when you embed the WMV the plugin will ignore the WMV and serve up the WEBM or OGV files. The only difference I think is that you still have that WMV file on your server.

[kylegilman]

I've considered this a little more and another user requested that I provide the option to select a lower resolution format to replace the original in order to save space on the server. If I do that, it would be simple to also add support for replacing with WEBM and OGV. It's not a priority at the moment though.

[kylegilman]

d02f1aa should fix this issue.