YouTube Transcodes All new Videos to WebM Format, Re-Encodes Existing Ones

YouTube Transcodes All new Videos to WebM Format, Re-Encodes Existing Ones

YouTube has already worked on transcoding all videos with the highest views on YouTube to the WebM format. This transcoding covers nearly 30% of all YouTube videos and makes up for 99% of the total views on YouTube. As a rule, YouTube will now transcode all uploaded videos to WebM format too, thereby making the web more open when it comes to video content.
WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term.

The entire video catalog of YouTube is massive, given the fact that YouTube adds nearly six years’ worth viewing time of videos every day. The announcement post also boasts of a new processing infrastructure that effectively manages the load between existing YouTube videos and new user uploads, for transcoding and re-encoding to WebM. This ensures a fail-proof method of encoding all new videos, and updating existing videos in the background as well.

Apart from webM, Google also promises to continue supporting the H.264 encoding for videos. Additionally, it has expressed its wish to develop an HTML5 video player as well. You can opt-in for the HTML5 video player here.

This is a big step for YouTube as it tries to unify all its videos into a single codec. Now that Google videos is shutting down, YouTube can be Google’s focus for video content.