YouTube starts converting new uploads to WebM

YouTube has announced that it is now transcoding all newly uploaded videos into WebM format. In addition, the entire back catalogue is in the process of being transcoded to WebM; the focus has been on the most popular videos, and those that account for 99 per cent of views are now in WebM, although these only account for 30 per cent of the total back catalogue.

The YouTube announcement states that the reason for adopting the open format for video is to "deliver great content to you wherever you are". YouTube is also part of Google and switching YouTube to WebM would be a major step forward for Google's open sourced video format. As YouTube will continue to also support the H.264 format, this means that the company's videos will be playable with the HTML5 <video> tag in most of the latest browsers. Internet Explorer and Safari support H.264 only for the <video> tag, Firefox and Opera only support WebM and currently Google's Chrome supports either format though Google has announced it will remove the H.264 support at some point.

Users wishing to try out the WebM format in YouTube should attach &webm=1 to the search string or to the URL of a known video.

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