80% of Daily YouTube Videos Now In WebM

An anonymous reader writes "OSNews has an update on the WebM project from a presentation given by Google's John Luther and Matt Frost at the Streaming Media West conference. OSNews writes, 'Earlier this year, Google finally did what many of us hoped it would do: release the VP8 codec as open source. It became part of the WebM project, which combines VP8 video with Vorbis audio in a Matroshka container. The product manager for the WebM project, John Luther, gave an update on the status of the project (PDF) — and it's doing great.'"

Comments

Not 80% of ALL youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

80% of HTML5 Beta videos are served as WebM. Not 80% of all youtube, duh.

Re:Not 80% of ALL youtube

[beelsebob]

Wrong, 80% of videos are available as WebM. Most of the html5 beta videos are served as h264, because very few people have WebM support.

Re:WebM versus H.264

[Americano]

yeay put the problem with buddhism is that it's almost hippies only.

Hundreds of millions of Asians would like to disagree with that characterization, you ignorant hick.

Lucky for you, they're Buddhists who honor the precept of doing no harm to others, or they'd probably kick your ass.

Re:"Available in WebM"

[Jazzbunny]

If you have opted in to use Html5 and website you visit uses iframe to embed YouTube videos you'll see the video without flashplugin. The codec used depends on the browser you are using: Firefox and Opera will play the WebM version, Safari and IE9 will use h.264. I'm not sure what codec Chrome will prefer, but most likely WebM.

Re:"Available in WebM"

[dr.newton]

With Chrome 7.0.517.44 (latest at the time of writing), I get WebM. Looks pretty good at 720p!

Re:WebM versus H.264

[arose]

Realistically there's no way there are patents out there that cover h264 and not VP8.

Back in actual, as opposed to perceived, reality On2 has been avoiding patent problems for well over a decade. This was made by a company that did nothing but video codecs, if they didn't know what they were doing in regards to patents, they wouldn't have survived.

Here's a better and less ranty writeup if you want to look into the arguments: http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=420

Re:"Available in WebM"

[KingMotley]

Fail. Chrome already supports h.264.

Copy paste from google owned youtube:
        * Firefox 4 (WebM, Beta available here)
        * Google Chrome (WebM and h.264)
        * Opera 10.6+ (WebM, Available here)
        * Apple Safari (h.264, version 4+)
        * Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 (h.264, Beta available here)
        * Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8 with Google Chrome Frame installed (Get Google Chrome Frame)

Re:WebM versus H.264

[Boycott BMG]

Apparently you don't understand that there are/were already 10x as many iPhones on the market before Android started to take off, but also that iPhones sold more units than Android last quarter. So I wouldn't say google is *owning*. They are far far behind, and they are falling even further behind. That said, #2 in smart phones is still a nice place to be.

Android was outselling iPhone worldwide last quarter. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/8125725/Google-Android-becomes-second-most-popular-smartphone-operating-system.html From the article:

Google's Android operating system now has a market share of 25.5 per cent worldwide, up from 3.5 per cent in the same period a year ago, according to the latest figures from Gartner. That means the smartphone platform is now second only to Symbian, which enjoys a 36.6 per cent share, down from 44.6 per cent over the same period the previous year. It puts Google Android well ahead of rival Apple, which has a 16.7 per cent share, and Research in Motion, with a 14.8 per cent share.

Re:WebM versus H.264

[takowl]

People always say this. But I can easily watch Flash video in full screen on Linux, and I often do. Just testing a (non-fullscreen) video now, it took up some 35% of one core (Pentium 5300: not exactly top of the range). I don't have a problem with it.