Thread:Pecoes/@comment-4190137-20121221063551/@comment-3508190-20121222170545

Audio files. You were talking about audio files. Not the player. I misunderstood you. The belated answer is: MP3s. All current browsers can play MP3s from an audio tag. OGGs not so much.

OGG is still an exotic format. The reason why the MediaWiki makers prefer OGG over MP3 is that it's not encumbered by patents and licensing issues. They don't have to pay anyone to use it and are safe from litigation. MP3 represents a risk they're not willing to take. MP3 support will never be a part of MediaWiki because it's open source software. Anyone should be able to use MediaWiki free of charge. That's the imperative of open source.

Wikia as a for-profit company is in a slightly different position than the Wikimedia Foundation of course. But that doesn't mean they would be willing to part ways with the Wikimedia Foundation on issues that are not only of practical but also of philosophical consequence.

So would Wikia allow MP3s? I suppose the fact that they currently don't answers that question... Feel free to ask it again - and I'm sure you're not the first person to ask - but don't get your hopes up.

Flash is a bit of a different beast. It's more or less controlled by one company: Adobe. But they open sourced its key components and it's quite possible to distribute SWFs under an open source license. That Muse player is distributed under the GPL which is kind of the flagship of open source licenses - the same MediaWiki uses. I really don't see why Wikia staff might have legal objections against this.

They may have other objections and quite a lot of them too, but legally this is not a problem.