What Wikimedia Commons is
Wikimedia Commons is the media library behind Wikipedia, with about four hundred thousand video files uploaded by individuals, institutions and archives: nature, science, timelapses, history and documentary footage. Every file records its licence and author, and the site transcodes uploads into WebM renditions from 240p up to 4K.
Best for
Nature and timelapse footage, scientific and educational clips, historic footage that institutions have digitised, and anything encyclopedic. Originals are WebM or Ogg Theora, never MP4.
Licence and what it means for your video
Set per file and recorded by Commons: CC0, public domain, CC BY and CC BY-SA are the most common. CC BY clips need a credit line, which each result carries. CC BY-SA is marked restricted, because a video that includes it would have to be released under the same licence. Commons' community reviews uploads and deletes files whose licence can't be confirmed, so licences there are more reliable than an anonymous upload elsewhere, but not infallible.
How Video Assets Server searches it
Through the public MediaWiki API, one request per search with each file's original, size, length, poster, licence and transcodes. A minimum resolution goes into the search itself. Wikimedia limits anonymous API clients, so this server sends a descriptive User-Agent, retries once on a short rate limit and caches results.
