YouTube Now Transcoding All New Uploads To WebM 267
theweatherelectric writes "According to the YouTube blog, YouTube is now transcoding all new uploads to WebM, whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video. Google's James Zern writes, '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.'"
Re:Open Standards Fanboy (Score:0, Interesting)
H.264 is produced, managed and licenced by a consortium of companies with excellent documentation and a low barrier to entry of said consortium. Patent liabilities are well-known.
WebM is produced by one firm, controlled by one firm, has had no real determination of patent liability, and is documented well by... no-one.
In organisational terms, WebM is closer to Flash and H.264 to HTML. In patent terms, WebM is undefined: a single corporation's promise is meaningless (going to hand over control of WebM to a non-profit consortium to be developed by a working group or some such? thought not) and there has been little to no effort to determine who may be owed what (legally speaking) for its implementation or deployment.
tl;dr H.264 is far more open than WebM.
Of course, the "open" solution is allowing lots of competing plug-in technologies rather than dropping support for everything which doesn't support your desire for control and resultant bottom line. Google, as the new Microsoft, are learning to take the latter approach.
Re:Open Standards Fanboy (Score:5, Interesting)
H.264 is produced, managed and licenced by a consortium of companies with excellent documentation and a low barrier to entry of said consortium. Patent liabilities are well-known.
At any point, someone not part of the group could pipe up and sue h264 for patent infringement, sure it's the same with webm, but to pretend that h264's patent liabilities are 'well known' is a farce. Sure some known patents are covered for, but there is no denying the possibility that there are submarine patents somewhere for it, just like there could be for webm.
That is the crux of it. All the people who made mpeg would have to do to get everyone on the h264 bandwagon is to say, unlimited royalty free redistributable license for all forever, and there would be no issue, since they won't do that, it's being worked around.
In other words, wait until the law suits start flying before you say webm is a patent minefield, or instead name some yourself that it breaks that it is liable for.
tl;dr H.264 is far more open than WebM.
If that were the case, there would be no issue shipping implementations of it with free operating systems.
Of course, the "open" solution is allowing lots of competing plug-in technologies rather than dropping support for everything which doesn't support your desire for control and resultant bottom line.
Last I checked people can make plugins for both firefox and chromium, what is your issue here? they have to ship in-built support for every third party format now? no, they can support what they want to support and others are free to implement plugins that add extra.
Google might very well be becoming a skynet equivalent, but that doesn't mean you have to hate the nicer things they do for us. Their goal is for an open internet that is completely platform agnostic, it gives them more eyeballs which is what they sell. That it is in googles best interest to provide us with an open internet is convenient and you should never look a gift horse in the mouth.