

YouTube Videos Now Served in WebM - abraham
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2011/04/mmm-mmm-good-youtube-videos-now-served.html

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Terretta
Anyone wanting to try hosting their own HD or SD video portfolio in WebM can
try <http://www.vive.ly/> which is like parts of Dropbox, Zencoder, and Hulu
in a blender, for original video files you want backed up, encoded, and
published publicly or privately -- without the YouTube problems of giving up
your copyrights or having competitor videos promoted alongside yours.

Drop your originals in a folder, we encode into SD and HD in H.264, Ogg, and
WebM, and build you a mini-Hulu video site that works in Flash, Silverlight,
or HTML5 across browsers. You can also download the encoded files for use
elsewhere, embed them, or rebrand the video site with your own logo and domain
name.

Use our Hacker News invite code hd4yc to sign up free, and let us know what
you think of the WebM encodes. We encode all the files in parallel, and the
video pages update as the versions become available, so you may have to wait a
bit for the WebM encodes to finish.

~~~
codejoust
Currently, it looks as if the gallery pages are using flash -- what about
using native html for browsers that can play WebM video natively?

~~~
Terretta
If the Vively subscriber sets his settings to HTML 5 or "video for everyone"
it will use that by default.

If you visit from iPad, you'll see video in HTML 5 regardless of the user's
Flash setting.

Btw, if you post a vertical video shot on iPhone, that works too, it will be
shown vertical.

We try to use the playback tech most likely to feel familiar and give good
performance for the end user (viewer). A Vively subscriber can set to HTML 5,
though, then preference is Ogg for Firefox, WebM for Chrome, H.264 for Safari.

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Samuel_Michon
From the article:

 _"Currently, there are countless devices used to record videos and hundreds
of different video file formats."_

H.264 is by far the most common. I don't know of any video camera or DSLR that
records to WebM or Theora.

 _"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."_

"Certain web browsers"? Chrome and Firefox are the only ones that don't
support H.264 natively. To view video on those browsers, it needs to be routed
through a plug-in like Flash (standard on Chrome) or QuickTime. Browsers like
Internet Explorer and Safari support the majority of all web video, right out
of the box, no plug-ins needed. On mobile devices, the situation is even more
obvious. Android is the only OS with support for WebM, and no mobile devices
have hardware acceleration for WebM, draining your device's battery in no-
time. However, all modern smartphones and tablets have support for H.264, most
of them with hardware acceleration.

I'm all for an open source alternative to H.264. If it's at least as good and
free to use, then I hope that it will become the standard; for the web, in
desktop operating systems, for mobile devices, for video cameras and DSLRs.
I'm just not convinced WebM is that alternative. It's unclear whether WebM is
as good as H.264, and it's unclear whether it's free to use.

~~~
patrickaljord
> Chrome and Firefox are the only ones that don't support H.264 natively.

Chrome and Firefox are the browsers that supports html5 video with the biggest
market share though.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
That's a very good point. IE9 has 3% usage share right now, but because it
can't run on XP, IE9 won't replace all the IE8 installs out there. In the same
vein, IE10 won't even run on Vista. That's why I doubt we'll see another
single version of IE being the most dominant. On top of that, Chrome usage is
growing rapidly. At the current rate, Chrome will be the most popular browser
in 12 to 18 months.

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jrnkntl

       "nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day"
    

I knew it was a huge amount every day, but this just blows my mind.

~~~
emmett
In the last 24 hours, we've had 12 years of video uploaded to Justin.tv. 12.17
in particular. So more than double YouTube :-)

Think about it this way: if you have an average of 365 people uploading a
video at any given time, you get 1 year of video per day. So YouTube probably
has around 2,000 people uploading a video at any given time. (Compare to the
number of channels on Justin.tv at any given time...)

~~~
corin_
That maths only adds up if they're uploading a live stream, but, correct me if
I'm wrong, the majority of YouTube uploads aren't that. So if they had exactly
365 people uploading videos for exactly 24 hours, it could be much more or
much less than one year of video, depending on how fast their connection
allowed them to upload.

~~~
emmett
Yes, that's true. So YouTube probably has far fewer than 2k people uploading
at any given time, since most people can upload faster than realtime (though
some are probably slower than realtime).

Doesn't really change my point though.

~~~
corin_
Yep, wasn't disagreeing with your point, just wanted to fix the maths :)

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mikeryan
It will be interesting to see if there's a noticeable quality difference.
Right now WebM is not comprable to H.264 except the baseline codec.

 _Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations,
resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term_ \- This line
doesn't jive at all with my understanding of the VP8 codec. I thought
implementations were left to devs, but the format was locked and didn't have
room to be improved on? Either way the whole spec seems to be built around
avoiding H.264 patent suite and "improving" on it is a minefield.

~~~
magicalist
"Right now WebM is not comparable to H.264 except the baseline codec."

It's comparable in the sense that AAC and MP3 are comparable. VP8 can look
excellent, it's just that high profile h264 can look better at the same
bitrate.

It's also extremely likely that youtube uses h264 baseline profile anyway,
since they serve to mobile devices (unless they secretly transcode and store
multiple h264 versions for every video).

~~~
mikeryan
_store multiple h264 versions for every video_

Pretty much every video content provider I know does this. I work primarily on
OTT Boxes (Roku, Boxee) and Connected TVs and all of those platforms support
bitrate selection of video assets based on a speed tests. I'd assume most
platforms doing progressive download of video over HTTP does the same.

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kinetik
This is great to see. Another step forward for the open web.

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aw3c2

      opt-in trial
    

Wasn't it like that from the beginning? Seeing the headline I assumed this was
big news and they changed to WebM as the default.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
The _HTML5 trial_ has always been opt-in, but also features H.264 files. WebM
has been the default _for HTML5_ since they introduced it, only falling back
to H.264 if WebM is not available (or back to Flash if the video require
adverts).

I think the big change is that they're now converting all uploads to WebM,
previously they had to be above 720p OR uploaded in WebM to trigger this.
Presumably because they've converted enough of the popular "classic" videos
that they can now spare the encode time for all new files. Just another
milestone on the journey towards having everything in WebM.

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steve-howard
The summary is that new videos are being transcoded to WebM, whereas the rest
is going to take a while. The fact that the transcoding is already partially
underway and I haven't noticed any difference probably speaks well for how the
transition has been going (admittedly, I generally keep my browsers very up-
to-date). EDIT: Aaah, just noticed the opt-in part.

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bpeebles
It's good they're doing this, but since I've switched to a browser with WebM
support a few months ago, and opted-in to the trial, I've run across only a
couple of videos not in WebM.

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antimatter15

        So far we’ve already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site
         or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM
    

There really isn't much of a long tail on YouTube, it seems. It's sort of
worrisome that google could throw away seventy percent of the videos with the
vast majority of users not caring.

~~~
smackfu
It just means most people tend to upload stuff that no one cares about.

~~~
jasonlotito
That's the wrong way of looking at it. Most people upload stuff few people
care about. Their is a large number of people who cater to a small community,
and YouTube makes sharing videos easy for that community. A low number of
views doesn't equate to low interaction, either.

Take a hobby of mine: miniature painting for $40k. I published battle report
videos, painting update videos, etc. I didn't have a large number of views,
but the views I got were from highly specific audience. So, I get 500 to 1000
views. That's clearly something that isn't high priority to the masses of
YouTube, but for the community that has built up around sharing videos like
that on YouTube, it's important.

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simoun
From a content provider point of view, there is no point in creating WebM
content. The H264 version works on all plateforms, why would they be
interested in paying for transcoding time to access a market they have
already... It might sound great, but I do not see the industry following
Google on that...

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ww520
This is great news. I hope the player can pick the WebM format automatically
based on the device capacity. Save a lot of headache for developers.

