GAFAM Decided to Stop 'Old' Formats From Working, Format-Shifting Treadmills Resemble the Certificate Cartel Keeping Everybody Forever Chasing Rotations
Published previously: GAFAM Mozilla Removes Theora Support, Now GNU Needs to Re-encode Videos | GAFAM Deprecating Old Videos ("Content") by Removing the Support for Their Format for No Good Reason
To avoid repeating what was said before, look what GAFAM is doing to the GNU Project or site, based on some flimsy excuses/pretexts of "security" (they don't want security anyway; they actively pursue back doors). Lots of extra chores because those who control the browsers decided that "too much choice" is bad, so they'll break "old" sites and make multimedia that's "old" not work anymore (not playable).
From Dora:
Hello, an update:
On 3/23/26 23:33, Dora Scilipoti wrote:I just sent someone a link to [1]https://www.gnu.org/education/ only to then find that modern browsers won't play the video there at all! I searched and found things like [2]https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1860492 I guess it seems unfortunate but maybe GNU.org can just update any Theora-related files like the .ogv there and use an updated WebM format? This is urgent in that we don't want people unable to see GNU media when working to spread free software understanding! AaronThis is now done, as well as the other video at https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-software-gimp.htmlWe had another video related to education that was encoded with Theora but not embedded in any page, only linked. So we converted it to WebM VP9/Opus and decided to put it right into a page because it's the best example we have to this day to show that the four freedoms can be applied in practice even by young children at school. It's at https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-cases-india-irimpanam.html
If someone would like to contribute subtitle translations, people can write to <web-translators@gnu.org> attaching the file. The subtitles in English (translated from Malayalam by the professor who recorded the original longer video) can be found at https://www.gnu.org/education/misc/edu-misc.html#subtitles-irimpanam
The contact address to collaborate with the GNU Education Team is <education@gnu.org>.
I should also mention that apart from these education videos, there are a bunch of others encoded with Theora that need to be converted. To participate in this task, there is this guide: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Adding_media_to_GNU_Audio-Video and people can also join the audio-video mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/audio-video
It's easier than it would seem by reading the guide, and we already have pretty efficient ffmpeg commands ready to put into use --Handbrake is another possibility.
Last but not least, I would like to thank again Aaron Wolf for bringing this issue to our attention.
Best regards, Dora
-- Dora Scilipoti gnu.org/education stallmansupport.org -- Disinformation succeeds because so many people care deeply about injustice but do not take the time to check the facts.
Many of our earlier videos used (and still use) Theora; but GAFAM isn't happy about this. The imperialistic companies can afford to mass-convert files, they know that others cannot (it doesn't scale; limited resources and other barriers exist). Way to shaft the competition online.
They do the same with SSL certificates, whose lifetime keeps being reduced (it's hard for ordinary people to rotate those things every week). This is part of the 'grand scheme' attack on self-hosting, decentralisation and so on. Make it complicated enough... then fewer people will bother. █