Mmm mmm good - YouTube videos now served in WebM
If you travel abroad frequently, you know that charging your electronic devices is not always an easy task. Power adapters for cellphones and computers don’t always fit into local power outlets, meaning you have to pack converters. Think of video on the web in a similar way. Currently, there are countless devices used to record videos and hundreds of different video file formats. Even more, certain web browsers that you use to view video online only accept certain ‘codecs’ - or programs used to encode, transmit and playback video files - and others require plug-ins (converters) to integrate the video file with the browser.
Despite these complexities, one of our key aims is to deliver great content to you wherever you are - regardless of device, browser or other technical specification, so you never have to remember that complicated “power adapter converter” to watch a video.
To that end, all new videos uploaded to YouTube are now transcoded into WebM. WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term. As we work to transcode more videos into WebM, we hope to reduce the technical incompatibilities that prevent you from accessing video while improving the overall online video landscape.
Transcoding all new video uploads into WebM is an important first step, and we’re also working to transcode our entire video catalog to WebM. Given the massive size of our catalog - nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day - this is quite the undertaking. So far we’ve already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. We’re focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we’ve made great progress here through our cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM. As we continue to transcode the remaining inventory, we’ll keep you posted on our progress.
In keeping with our goal of making videos universally accessible, we will continue to support H.264 as an important codec for video on YouTube. We are also committed to continuing to develop our HTML5 video player that we announced last year, and if you’d like to join the opt-in trial, you can do so here.
The world of online video is incredibly complex and dynamic. Yet, our goal is to ensure that nothing stands between you and the great content you’ve always enjoyed. We’ll continue to invest in new video technology that improves the experiences for all users, builds a better infrastructure for online video, leads to greater access of information and spurs continued innovation.
James Zern, Software Engineer, recently watched "HTML5 Video Accessiblity and the WebVTT File Format".
Despite these complexities, one of our key aims is to deliver great content to you wherever you are - regardless of device, browser or other technical specification, so you never have to remember that complicated “power adapter converter” to watch a video.
To that end, all new videos uploaded to YouTube are now transcoded into WebM. WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term. As we work to transcode more videos into WebM, we hope to reduce the technical incompatibilities that prevent you from accessing video while improving the overall online video landscape.
Transcoding all new video uploads into WebM is an important first step, and we’re also working to transcode our entire video catalog to WebM. Given the massive size of our catalog - nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day - this is quite the undertaking. So far we’ve already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. We’re focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we’ve made great progress here through our cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM. As we continue to transcode the remaining inventory, we’ll keep you posted on our progress.
In keeping with our goal of making videos universally accessible, we will continue to support H.264 as an important codec for video on YouTube. We are also committed to continuing to develop our HTML5 video player that we announced last year, and if you’d like to join the opt-in trial, you can do so here.
The world of online video is incredibly complex and dynamic. Yet, our goal is to ensure that nothing stands between you and the great content you’ve always enjoyed. We’ll continue to invest in new video technology that improves the experiences for all users, builds a better infrastructure for online video, leads to greater access of information and spurs continued innovation.
James Zern, Software Engineer, recently watched "HTML5 Video Accessiblity and the WebVTT File Format".
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37 comments:
Hello, any idea if this html webm format saves mobile broadband 3G bandwidth for verizon and att and customer, and by what factor ? I have limited 3G bandwidth. Any plans to make this default in Google Chrome and Android for youtube etc ?
Thanks, Avinash
keep up the good work
Good, but probably improving the player would be a more important step. It's not that great-looking and it doesn't support most of YouTube's features. In my case it's even 10 seconds slower to start, which is pretty bad.
Right. Until Google locks it up like they did with honeycomb.
Is YouTube doing some sort of version detection before serving WebM? I'm running a Firefox nightly and can't get the website to serve me a WebM video for love of money ... :(
Awesome news!
WebM is a great format.
Thank you YouTube.
your html5 player sucks
Points for effort, NO points for execution.
First, the HTML5 Trial limits videos to 720p even if they are uploaded in 1080p.
Second, the *BUG* where 1080p videos have the lower frame removed, effectively reducing their resolution into 1920x540 is still there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiW6mNlJHtE
The black bar on the right side should have been alternating black and white horizontal stripes.
great job, a very welcome codec switch :)
Will you keep the Flv format available?
Just wondering: Will it ever be possible to watch WebM videos in iOS?
Thank you!
BTW: what are the criteria to make WebM default without the opt-in?
Weren't you planing on some more general WebM option akin to the current "language, location, safe mode" options rather than the &webm=1 search url extension?
I've kicked those Flash plugins from my system yet I still stumble across non-WebM videos too often on youtube. It would be great if non HTML5 videos could be filtered if you detect that no plugin is a available to display Flash.
Wow.
I wonder how Google is going to respond to this screwing of all their Android users by....
wait a minute...
Is Google going to indemnify users if they have the WebM codec installed?
I hope they are using libvorbis to encode the audio, otherwise it will be a big mess-up
Finally !!
The sequester like situation is coming to an end.
Hope the same happens with the infamous MP3 and this one is finally dropped so to eliminate patent abuse from the virtual entities that own what others (real people) create.
No corporation should be allowed rights over people or resources. They do not create, only "manage".
No patent should be sold, as only non-exclusive permissions the ideal and origins of patenting.
In a fair world, at least.
Patents were created to protect inventors.
Not to the abuse against everybody as we see.
And specially not to use the Law as a weapon for threat.
In a world of justice, the only reason for making laws.
It would be nice if it worked with the current firefox nightlies. The same sort of people who are most likely to be interested in webm may also want to use the bleeding edge firefox.
This is especially a concern because firefox video support is still evolving and it would be terrible if youtube broke and it wasn't noticed until a release.
It would be great if had a page for showing the progress of the conversion. Like a page that shows the percentage of the catalog that is in WebM. Something like http://youtube.com/html5/progess
Youtube.com is been so fantastic, super great since it was started to introduced in the web.
---Decorative Concrete
Yay, a solution to a problem that does not exist. A fringe unsupported codec that works in maybe one browser and few mobile devices. You might as well support Cinepack while you're at it.
Meanwhile, in Reality every mobile device shipping supports H.264 in hardware including every Android phone and tablet.
All this hassle so GOOG can try to weasel out of paying the MPEG LA fees.
I've seen videos in WebM, the quality is bad compared to no-WebM. Why is that?
WebM is not good format, quality is not good, support is not good, WebM is not good! h.264 is best!
I have one problem with HTML5 option @ youtube: there is almost never 480p video quality option. This forces me to use flashplayer, because 360p is unacceptable.
Ian, quit blowing smoke out of your butt and telling me it's fog. Firefox 4 supports WebM. Chrome and Chromium have for a while. *Internet Explorer 9* and *Safari* will eventually support it via plugins. If you think that's "maybe one browser" I'd hate to see the state of your checkbook.
Epiphany (the Gnome webkit browser) supports WebM too.
Why doesn't youtube fall back to HTML5 when Flash is not installed? It gives the illusion Flash is still a must-have.
h.264 is better.
Want to elaborate a wee bit? Not sure what you are getting at... The HTML5 spec is viewable on the w3c site, and it does not include, nor will it include, anything outside of the markup language itself. The plan going forward is to keep Apis not directly related to markup outside of the "standard" and track them under separate working groups.
I got a simple suggestion that might improve response time: Turn off the auto-play on videos, this will cut down on wasted resources when somebody clicks a video by mistake or when they are unable to watch it immediately.
Ugh. I'll take the patented h.264 codec any day over the low quality WebM. If I see a decrease in quality with videos I upload to Youtube, I'll simply go elsewhere. This decision by Google is pointless and a waste of computing power.
Would this have anything to do with why I can't see any videos from my Safari browser today? Not at all on embeds across the tubes and can only hear the videos on your site. Seems to work fine in Firefox, but a big bubkes on Safari... and I update everything immediately....
So. Have you just done something you should have mentioned to the Safari people a little earlier? Or did my browser suddenly lose it while I slept?
If the quality degrades there will be a backlash. Might sound silly to suggest this, but when you're dealing with 480p uploads, it's conceivable the Webm re-code might be inferior. I hope they don't underestimate that danger, like the did with the recent Google Video mis-step. A lot of people have a lot of very important material on youtube in 480p. If it suddenly looks poorer, it will erode many people's otherwise pristine Google experience.
It would be nice if it formed with the accepted firefox nightlies. The aforementioned array of humans who are a lot of acceptable to be absorbed in webm may aswell wish to use the bleeding bend firefox.
NeevSoftware
Finally..I was hear about it and i was expect it more sooner this.
robot
WebM is first of all free and open source, which welcomes the collaboration of all the world and people who understand technology and collaboration appreciate this. H 264 is held by a few big corporations, and no John Doe is welcome to participate.(if they ask a polite question they get a f*** you in return, bad corporations...)
M2 i was expect it more soon.
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When I download a video from youtube to my desktop and burn it to watch on my dvd player the video comes out as big blotchy squares.How can I get the videos to play sharp and clear? Thanks Jay
erbcarter1@yahoo.com
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