New York — In an effort to promote royalty-free video technology as well as to improve the quality of its video streaming service YouTube over the Internet, search engine giant Google plans to help separate the Web from H.264 video, YouTube has begun transcoding all uploaded videos into WebM, the open media file format backed by its parent company, Google.
YouTube announced that the majority of its most viewed videos are available in WebM, almost nearly 30 percent of all videos hosted by the site, which incidentally uses an open compression technology and is also royalty free.
Besides, for YouTube users, the change is not likely to be noticeable: They will be able to see WebM videos in Firefox 4+, Opera 10.60+, Chrome 6+, or Internet Explorer 9–with the appropriate plug-in–through YouTube’s experimental HTML5 player rather than seeing H.264 versions of those videos presented in a Flash container. Nonetheless, as Mozilla’s director of community development, Aza Dotzler, put it, “this matters a lot.”
In addition, all new videos uploaded to YouTube are now automatically transcoded into WebM, a video format based around the VP8 codec, as well as other supported formats, which include MPEG4, 3GPP, MOV, AVI, MPEGPS, WMV, and FLV, and are intended for use with HTML5 video.
In an announcement, the Google owned video-sharing site YouTube said they are working to transcode the rest of the YouTube catalog.
“Given the massive size of our catalog — nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day–this is quite a humongous undertaking,” says software engineer James Zern. “So far we have already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. Currently, we are focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we have made great progress here through our cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping.”
WebM is a video container format introduced last year that includes Google’s royalty-free VP8 video codec and the Vorbis audio codec. Backed by Google, Mozilla, and Opera, to name a few, WebM is a competitor of the H.264 format, backed by Apple and predominantly used for mobile video because of the lack of Flash support on iOS devices.
“While we believe the democratization of publishing and earning potential is an important part of the progress of the Web, we want to avoid a situation where a portion of content negatively impacts the rankings of high quality content,” said HubPages CEO Paul Admondson. “It appears HubPages has been impacted by this while YouTube has not, despite HubPages having a more strict content policy.”
Zern also described how YouTube is working to convert the rest of the videos into the WebM format: “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.”
The sudden shift by Google comes close on the heels of its decision to drop the H.264 standard from its Chrome web browser. The H.264 standard is reportedly preferred by technology majors Apple and Microsoft while Google it seems is now looking at pursuing an open standard.
The shift also is likely to adversely affect the popularity of Adobe’s Flash video format since Google intends to convert all old videos present in Flash format to the WebM standard.
Given the dominance of YouTube in online video streaming market, the format it chooses to adopt will most likely become one that sticks. With its adoption of WebM, it looks like Adobe’s grip on the web is loosening and with it the dependency on Adobe’s proprietary Flash software is going to take a significant hit, more so with YouTube firming up plans to develop its own HTML5 video player.