Google has announced on the official Youtube blog that in the future, all the popular video streaming services will be adopting the WebM format for all their videos. WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows any user to improve the format and its integrations which leads to better experience for you. YouTube aims to create one format that fits all standard by adopting WebM by comparing different video formats to power adapters and power outlets. All the videos that played on different devices, will be streamed in the same format in the future and hence are trans-coded in webM.
Now great content will be delivered to you, despite wherever you are – regardless of device, browser or other technical specification which leads you to not to remember that complicated “power adapter converter” to watch a video and you would not have to download a whole bunch of different codecs or plug-ins when using different browsers to watch videos on YouTube. This means that there is no need to create mobile-optimized content as the mobile devices like smartphones can access the same content as desktop computers.
Youtube is trans coding all new video uploads into WebM and also working to trans-code the entire video catalog to WebM when the servers are not so busy. Only 30% of videos have been converted- not much but that makes up 99% of views on the site. In order to eliminate the problems for the users of different browsers and devices while playing videos on YouTube, YouTube will still continue to support H.264 as an important codec – sounds good! It also committed to continuing to develop our HTML5 video player. Hope all these will happen in actual!
