Google has announced that all new uploads to YouTube will be transcoded in the WebM format. In a blog post yesterday, YouTube software engineer, James Zem explained that ‘We’ve already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM.’
The company announced last year that it would no longer support H.264 in its Chrome web browser, but according to Zem, YouTube has no plans to abandon that format. ‘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,’ he said.
The WebM format comprises the VP8 video codec, bought by Google last year, and Vorbis audio. Google has already released WebM as royalty-free and open source. That open source status however, has been challenged by MPEG LA, the company responsible for managing licences for video codecs on behalf of patent owners such as Apple and Microsoft. In February, its chief executive claimed: ‘VP8 is not patent-free. It’s simply nonsense.’
That view is shared by Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, who wrote in an email to the Free Software Foundation last year: ‘Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.’
Google’s promotion of WebM is seen by some as a push to have it adopted as the de facto standard for HTML 5 video. It is currently running an HTML 5 YouTube trial which uses the HTML 5 video tag to display WebM video.
Currently, however, neither Safari nor Internet Explorer 9 support the WebM format without a plug-in. And there are currently no WebM plug-ins for Safari, so Mac users who want to view WebM video need to use the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, or Opera.
