YouTube Tuesday said it's now transcoding all uploaded videos to the website in the WebM format, as well as all other supported formats (MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files, as well as AVI, MPEGPS, WMV and FLV). The Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) video site also will continue to support H.264 and will continue work on developing its own HTML5 video player that it announced last year.
YouTube software engineer James Zern blogged that the countless devices and multitude of video formats prompted the move, ensuring YouTube can "deliver great content to you wherever you are -- regardless of device, browser or other technical specification."
WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web that allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations.
"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," Zern wrote.
But it's not just the new videos being uploaded that are being transcoded into WebM-about 6 years of video currently comes onto the site every day-YouTiube said it's in the process of transcoding its entire catalog.
"So far we've already transcoded videos that make up 99 percent of views on the site or nearly 30 percent of all videos into WebM," Zern wrote. "We're focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we've made great progress here."
For more:
- see the blog post
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