Google already maintains a large number of copies of YouTube videos, one for each quality level and now they've been adding h.264 and they may have some special ones for different devices I don't know about. Asking for one more in a codec that they own is not much to ask.
Not quite true. They have the following from what I've seen:
1) fmt=6 FLV with ffmpeg ~350kbps (legacy)
2) fmt=18 H.264 Baseline ~500kbps, now with x264 (iPhone support + current default)
3) fmt=22 720p H.264 High with x264, ~2.2mbps
4) fmt=somethingorother 1080p H.264 High with x264, ~4.5mbps
Note that options 3) and 4) don't exist for the vast majority of videos, and thus likely don't cost much disk space. Option 1) is being phased out. Their primary default is 2), a single format that works in Flash, on iPods, on iPhones, and on many mobile devices. They could have saved 30-50% on bandwidth by offering an H.264 High stream for PC viewers, but they didn't because it would have required they keep around a separate stream.
Any argument that Youtube should keep around a separate format for some Purpose X has to confront the fact that Google has thrown away staggering quantities of bandwidth explicitly to avoid offering a separate format.
Yeah, at least that has multiple independent implementations.
All the On2 stuff just has the one, especially since they only ever released new incompatible codecs instead of improving their older products. Funnily enough that applies just as much to Theora (née VP3), which right now is a only an open standard in theory, not IETF-level reality. There's a few forks of the original On2 code and a transliteration of the decoder to Java for applets (Cortado). I guess people have been working on writing a new DSP decoder, but the whole thing feels like an even worse recapitulation of the ODF lie.
This is IMO the core problem with proprietary-based "standards": even if the formats are opened, people rarely make independent implementations of them and bugs often persist for years before being found.
Not quite true. They have the following from what I've seen:
1) fmt=6 FLV with ffmpeg ~350kbps (legacy)
2) fmt=18 H.264 Baseline ~500kbps, now with x264 (iPhone support + current default)
3) fmt=22 720p H.264 High with x264, ~2.2mbps
4) fmt=somethingorother 1080p H.264 High with x264, ~4.5mbps
Note that options 3) and 4) don't exist for the vast majority of videos, and thus likely don't cost much disk space. Option 1) is being phased out. Their primary default is 2), a single format that works in Flash, on iPods, on iPhones, and on many mobile devices. They could have saved 30-50% on bandwidth by offering an H.264 High stream for PC viewers, but they didn't because it would have required they keep around a separate stream.
Any argument that Youtube should keep around a separate format for some Purpose X has to confront the fact that Google has thrown away staggering quantities of bandwidth explicitly to avoid offering a separate format.