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YouTube Now Transcoding All New Uploads To WebM
theweatherelectric writes "According to the YouTube blog, YouTube is now transcoding all new uploads to WebM, whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video. Google's James Zern writes, 'Transcoding all new video uploads into WebM is an important first step, and we're also working to transcode our entire video catalog to WebM. Given the massive size of our catalog — nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day — this is quite the undertaking. So far we've already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. We're focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we've made great progress here through our cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM. As we continue to transcode the remaining inventory, we'll keep you posted on our progress.'"
When are we going to get YouTube in 3d?
No doubt at the lowest possible bit-rate giving even worse video quality than they already do.
"It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM."
OMG! Quick, someone implement this ground breaking technique into EVERYTHING!
Dear Slashdot, what point in the past do you formally recognize 'yourself' as having become redundant / post-shark jumper?
Anon
When you have critical mass, use it. Microsoft and others can bitch about their patent encumbered format 'til they are blue in the face, but Google knows when it comes to video on the web, Youtube is the first thing people think of and the first place they look.
If no other move makes a difference in this html5 format war, this move is the blitzkrieg that will pretty much end it quickly and definitely.
is "Friday" converted yet?
"Geeks" have the problem of not knowing how to market things properly. Let's take two examples everyone knows: OGG/Vorbis. What's the penetration of this open and free format out in the music player industry? Zero. Another example: Theora. Penetration? Zero.
Vote troll all you want, but these are facts - as much facts as the reality that current WebM encoders do a worse job in terms of video quality than x264 does for H.264. End-users' experience doesn't matter, I take it.
Not for a long time, but still, Seamonkey stable still does not support WebM, it is in upcoming 2.1 as I understand. Seamonkey does not represent a large portion of clients, of course.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
Until computers/phones have hardware to decode it this will just result in shorter battery life for everyone.
H.264 is produced, managed and licenced by a consortium of companies with excellent documentation and a low barrier to entry of said consortium. Patent liabilities are well-known.
WebM is produced by one firm, controlled by one firm, has had no real determination of patent liability, and is documented well by... no-one.
In organisational terms, WebM is closer to Flash and H.264 to HTML. In patent terms, WebM is undefined: a single corporation's promise is meaningless (going to hand over control of WebM to a non-profit consortium to be developed by a working group or some such? thought not) and there has been little to no effort to determine who may be owed what (legally speaking) for its implementation or deployment.
tl;dr H.264 is far more open than WebM.
Of course, the "open" solution is allowing lots of competing plug-in technologies rather than dropping support for everything which doesn't support your desire for control and resultant bottom line. Google, as the new Microsoft, are learning to take the latter approach.
Nice troll.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
Help! Help! Someone is trying to give me something for free!
Fine. Now that we have secured our ability to post and view unprovocative videos of kittens and whatnot, how about solving the problem of free speech on the internet?
Youtube can and do limit speech by removing videos and suspending users. We need a free speech tube! This probably means that it can't be financed by ads. (Or at least not financed by any old ad. Maybe there are companies who's CEO:s and boards are hard-core free-speechists who would finance such a site.) Remember, free speech is not the same thing as good speech. The ultimate litmus test for a free speech video site would be whether someone could post a video denying the holocaust and promoting Nazism.
Of course, any free speech video site would have to remove illegal content such as incitement and defamation.
It's been established that WebM's only real advantage is in being supposedly patent-free, with H.264 still offering significantly more room for higher quality at lower bitrates.
But YouTube doesn't care about efficiency, really. They care about speed and compatibility, which significantly reduces their options. I wonder how x264 fairs compression-wise against YouTube's WebM encoder when tuned to run at the same speed. I'd guess probably still better, but I haven't seen anyone do this sort of test.
Based on their graphs, a 3min video takes them about 1min 45sec to finish encoding -- about 85fps. Unfortunately they don't list what resolution that's in, or what encoders/settings they use.
Are they transcoding from the original upload materia going back to 2005, or are they transcoding from 240p .flv in many cases?
WebMediocrity?
WebMonopoly?
H.264 is produced, managed and licenced by a consortium of companies with excellent documentation and a low barrier to entry of said consortium. Patent liabilities are well-known.
At any point, someone not part of the group could pipe up and sue h264 for patent infringement, sure it's the same with webm, but to pretend that h264's patent liabilities are 'well known' is a farce. Sure some known patents are covered for, but there is no denying the possibility that there are submarine patents somewhere for it, just like there could be for webm.
That is the crux of it. All the people who made mpeg would have to do to get everyone on the h264 bandwagon is to say, unlimited royalty free redistributable license for all forever, and there would be no issue, since they won't do that, it's being worked around.
In other words, wait until the law suits start flying before you say webm is a patent minefield, or instead name some yourself that it breaks that it is liable for.
tl;dr H.264 is far more open than WebM.
If that were the case, there would be no issue shipping implementations of it with free operating systems.
Of course, the "open" solution is allowing lots of competing plug-in technologies rather than dropping support for everything which doesn't support your desire for control and resultant bottom line.
Last I checked people can make plugins for both firefox and chromium, what is your issue here? they have to ship in-built support for every third party format now? no, they can support what they want to support and others are free to implement plugins that add extra.
Google might very well be becoming a skynet equivalent, but that doesn't mean you have to hate the nicer things they do for us. Their goal is for an open internet that is completely platform agnostic, it gives them more eyeballs which is what they sell. That it is in googles best interest to provide us with an open internet is convenient and you should never look a gift horse in the mouth.
h.264 hardware support is in my TiVo, my point-and-shoot camera, my dedicated video camera, my Apple products, my Android phone ... the list goes on. WebM is useless to me. It locks me back to a software codec. It requires a transcode. If YouTube doesn't work for me, I'll just stop using it. No great loss. Plenty of websites out there will stream video for me, use h.264, not require Flash, and even not decimate my soundtrack. I've already pulled out of Google Calendar and reduced GMail to just bills/online shopping/online signups with mandatory email addresses, looks like I'll be pulling out of YouTube, too.
I noticed this week that YouTube videos will now make my old laptop overheat and shut down. I can't get through a 4 minute video anymore. I took it apart, cleaned the fans/heat sinks, made sure the fans still ran, and tried a few different video sites, but YouTube seems to be the only one with a problem.
Is this a freak coincidence (or not so freak, it is a 4 year old laptop and my test was far from scientific), or is WebM more processor intensive to decode than the old encoding?
This sentence no verb.
From TFA ... let's translate.
one of our key aims is to deliver great content to you wherever you are - regardless of device, browser or other technical specification
So let's take a step backwards here from the ubiquitous, standards-backed h.264 to something that currently exists only from us and only in battery-sucking Flash format.
Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term.
It will be no time at all before people "improve" the codec by adding things to it that won't work on your particular player or device.
"What is WebM?
WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web.
WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container."
One thing I've been thinking ever since I joined YouTube HTML5 preview, is: do they know how much easier it is to download their videos when playing them back in HTML5? I know that one can also extract Flash video in one way or another, but with HTML5, at least on my setup - Firefox 4 on Ubuntu 9.10 - all it takes is choosing "Save Video" in context-menu. Voila - you can now have whatever you like on YouTube for your own private viewing.
The definite advantage to this, is that one can skip the page parsings and renderings, and instead simply use say mplayer to launch and watch or listen to your favs. Let's face it - the cloud or web 2.0 applications are too slow, at least for me there is noticeable delay. mplayer handles webm videos in much better way than even Firefox 4, not to mention the monstrocity that is Adobe Flash. I simply download anything I watch more than 5 times in a month to the local storage.
cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos
Finally, a clear and concise explanation of "the cloud". Its batch processing just like JCL on MVS/360. And to think people thought it was something new...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"Apple will follow suit eventually, they might resist for a while but with Android's rising market share and Google controlling Youtube, they're caught between a rock and a hard place and I'm sure they know it."
Or...
Watch this space for iTube?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I just got this crazy idea for dealing with this problem:
When people make unauthorized copies of non-free material, prosecute them for doing that.
I know this goes against the legal mainstream (viz. find out what they used to do that and ban it); I'm just thinking out loud.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The only question I have is does it affect me in any way? I'm using Fedora 14 with FF3. It would be very nice to ditch the flash plugin, which I'm only using for Youtube and other video content.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Utter rubbish.
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?470666
tl;dr "Google hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer implementations of this specification"
IOW: Anyone may use, anyone may implement, full permission is granted irrevocably and in perpetuity (as long as you don't sue Google).
Specification is documented and submitted to the ITEF.
An independent implementation is here:
http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/499
Your claim "H.264 is far more open than WebM" couldn't be more wrong if you tried for millennia to make it more incorrect.
The MPEG LA announced their call for VP8 video patents and then they spent a month looking for them. It's now over a month since their patent search ended, so do they have any patents relevant to VP8 or not? I guess not:
http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/vp8/default.aspx
Grandpa can always re-upload his videos (for free!) if he's not satisfied by the quality of the (free!) transcoding.
You aren't using a (free!) web service without keeping a local copy, now are you?
"According to the YouTube blog, YouTube is now transcoding all new uploads to WebM, whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video.
WebM is a file format. 720p and 1080p are resolutions. They are not mutually exclusive. This is like saying "Ford are now making black cars, whereas previously the focus was on cars with round wheels."
I hope they use libvorbis instead of ffvorbis for the vorbis audio otherwise it will be a big messup.
Indeed. But, for it to work, there's also another needed step :
Step "1 1/2" : Widespread hardware availability.
It's already on the way.
WebM is basically H264 with the patented bit swapped out, so just like lots of prior knowledge could be leveraged to code a WebM codec, lots of prior hardware blocks in dedicated decoders could be leveraged to make WebM hardware support.
Also, lots of modern embed platforms feature much more than just a RISC CPU core : vector units, DSPs, and Compute-capable graphic cores are the norm.
Thus, one can already find on the web proof-of-concept code for WebM (and for Theora, for that matters).
Though I don't know yet how much actual usage in end user product it has seen as of yet. (Probably, Android will provide some vector- / DSP- / OpenCL- accelerated support on compatible platforms, soonish)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
F#$@ useragent sniffing.
webm = matroska(VP8,vorbis). there's some kinda subtitles in there too.
matroska is patent free and open standard
vorbis is patent free (by design) and has been around and in pretty wide use long enough that if there were submarines they'd have sunk by now.
VP8 was the last work of On2 tech, who famously donated the patents and source for VP3 to xiph for use in theora. there have been no challenges in court to this, and VP3 was used for years in flash video and youtube itself.
now, the technical problems:
matroska doesn't actually support standard frame rates - it has a frame length stored on every frame, set in nanoseconds. this mauls standard rates like 24000/1001 and 30000/1001, but it isn't a huge issue as a competent splitter will know what to do.
vorbis doesn't really have a lot of problems, though computational complexity (and hence battery time) used to be an issue. not sure if it is still (i think it used to be float only, but i've no idea).
VP8 is a big mess and has some roadblocks to quality. these appear to have been a consequence of on2 consciously avoiding as many patents as possible. the x264 crew appear to be working on a VP8 encoder, so we'll see what happens there.
About damn time!!
x264's results consistently bests WebM at same (and sometimes even lower) bitrate.
The consensus among previous articles linked from Slashdot stories, as I understand it, is that VP8 is roughly comparable to AVC's baseline profile. When you compare the VP8 encoder to x264 set to baseline profile, what do you get?
They are out of date
By how long? And how much are you willing to pay the testers to update their comparison?
They use poor source material
They transcode from one lossy source to another
As I understand it, all consumer and prosumer camcorders use a lossy codec. So what freely available non-lossy source do you recommend using to evaluate codecs? Big Buck Bunny alone isn't enough, as CGI movies don't exercise the portion that deals with real-world camera noise, real-world detail, and the lossy encoding artifacts inherent in home-movie source material.
They use still shots of moving video to prove a pre-conceived notion that one is "better" than the other.
I assume that in a lot of cases, they can't make the actual encoded video available due to copyright restrictions. Again, what test cases do you recommend?
I just want to know one thing. :/
Have they stopped the RIDICULOUS policy of when switching a video to full screen, it re-buffers the whole damned thing again?
As an Aussie with mid speed internet links, it's just wasteful in both my time and bandwidth. Not all videos stream faster than you can watch
Yes, I've posted on their forums no response.
Yepp, unless WebM is govenred by ISO/IEC or IEEE or any other similar organization I don't want it.
Time for a competing service to sky rocket supporting standards. So far I'm all into MPEG and wont change that unless an other standard comes along. Will never make WebM content for any purpose just as little I do any WMV.
Everything i code goes into h.264, finale.
All should have similar stand, I'm not against WebM, just standardize it and I'm on the wave, but unless that happens I will resist.
Would not surprise me if this evil move from google is in cooperation with Adobe. Google promise to fight for flash, and Adobe will fight for WebM as they promised already.
the whole h.264 patents are submarine patents for WebM, yes I exaggerate but thats how it is.
There is no issue in shipping implementations of h.264 in free systems. Just that nobody wants to pay the licenses. Though it's quite small fee.
It's more open than webm, it's less free.
H.264 is produced, managed and licenced by a consortium of companies with excellent documentation and a low barrier to entry of said consortium. Patent liabilities are well-known.
Why do people keep trolling with this garbage? H.264 is patent encumbered and the organization is constantly and clearly trying to position it to leverage for massive royalties down the road. They openly admit that. Its also closed sourced.
WebM is produced by one firm, controlled by one firm, has had no real determination of patent liability, and is documented well by... no-one.
What you mean is, it appears to be equally patent free, guarded by one of the largest tech companies on earth who clearly have an extremely important vested interest in its health and survival, is extremely well documented given that the source is freely available. Furthermore, anyone can use the codec in their project (modified or unmodified) for anything.
and there has been little to no effort to determine who may be owed what (legally speaking) for its implementation or deployment.
And this is just bullshit and stupidity. A company the size of Google, as standard practice, is absolutely going to perform patent searches and evaluate their current and future liabilities. Unless you have proof they specifically did not do what every large company does, you're trolling and talking about your ass. What a surprise.
tl;dr H.264 is far more open than WebM.
Except in the real world where is absolutely is not unless you're a complete fucking idiot.
The bottom line is, WebM is already competing with H.264 in visual quality. WebM's encoding performance (time) is worse than H.264 but still acceptable. On the other hand, WebM has superior decoding attributes and is on par with H.264 (software vs hardware). With newer hardware which now supports WebM, WebM provides a superior decoding experience which directly translates into better battery life. Future hardware is expected to widen the gap even more.
The combination means WebM has visual parity with H.264 while providing superior battery life. For the majority of the world, no one gives a crap about encoding time and in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter at, all so long as its good enough. Add to the fact its perpetually royalty free, open source, freely available licensing, and seemingly, patent unencumbered (which is technically on equal footing with H.264), WebM looks better than H.264 anyway you want to look at it so long as you're not a complete fucking idiot.
Hell, the fact that the H.264 consortium is going out of their way to patent troll WebM and has yet to state they've found anything is yet more proof of WebM's unencumbered patent status.
So please, stop with your fucking idiocy and stop spewing lies and trolling. H.264 is only more attractive if either you're a complete fucking idiot or you have a vested financial interest in H.264. For the rest of the world, WebM is the winner.
Seriously? The ISO (I sold out) organisation that Microsoft bribed to push their standard through. Who gives a shit about them? Let me guess, Microsoft employee or partner employee?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ogg Vorbis absolutely dominates in the gaming market. Nearly every computer game being sold these days uses ogg -- not mp3 -- for their embedded music and sound effects. Puts a bit of a damper on your anti-freedom campaign, now doesn't it?
For those of you who haven't tried it, don't give up. Right clicking won't let you down.
The only issues some people might have are the video and audio artifacts introduced. Neither seems to exactly match the original video.
Actually, to be patent independent does NOT "require significant differences in their implementation". They just need to avoid or invalidate the patent claims, which are often really narrow. For more information, see Andrew Tridgell on Patent Defence. Which is why the statement that "VP8 is similar to H264" can be both true and a non-problem.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
"YouTube is now transcoding all new uploads to WebM, whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video."
WebM is a codec. 720p and 1080p are measures of resolution.
A WebM video could be 720p, 1080p, or any other size.
A 720p or 1080p video could be encoded in WebM, or any other codec that exists.
upto wich gpl u use
even better choose bsd or apache
H.264 is patent encumbered and the organization is constantly and clearly trying to position it to leverage for massive royalties down the road.
They are trying to position it for massive royalities by... declaring it free of royalties for web streaming forever? That's one cunning plan right there.
Its also closed sourced.
This statement is non-sensical. A format can not be "open source" or "closed source". It can be openly documented or not. h.264 is quite well and openly documented, and the best implementation of an encoder for it, x264, is 100% open source.
guarded by one of the largest tech companies on earth who clearly have an extremely important vested interest in its health and survival,
You could say the same of Android, and look at how well that is working out.
A company the size of Google, as standard practice, is absolutely going to perform patent searches and evaluate their current and future liabilities. Unless you have proof they specifically did not do what every large company does,
Again, Android.
The bottom line is, WebM is already competing with H.264 in visual quality.
Not at all. On its best settings, it competes with h.264 on its worst settings. On equal terms, WebM still loses every time.
On the other hand, WebM has superior decoding attributes and is on par with H.264 (software vs hardware). With newer hardware which now supports WebM, WebM provides a superior decoding experience which directly translates into better battery life.
You seem to be confusing WebM with Theora. Theora requires less work to decode. WebM does not, it has some features which require quite a bit of processing power during decoding. It also has much less support for dedicated hardware, which gives h.264 another edge in speed and power usage.
So please, stop with your fucking idiocy and stop spewing lies and trolling.
Before swearing at and accusing others of trolling, make sure you know what you are talking about.
Errrm, +1. Now, to get Moz to use hw acceleration for webm and to get a webm-enabled crystalhd card for my linu netbook!
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
MS standars?....
What ever, ISO is a standardizing organization. Who came up with what and standardized it, is no matter to me. Was it Apple, MS or who ever.
whereas previously the focus was on 720p and 1080p video.
More specifically, it was on H.264 720p and 1080p video.
They are trying to position it for massive royalities by... declaring it free of royalties for web streaming forever? That's one cunning plan right there.
I stopped read right there given that its factually incorrect. Its royalty free for non-commercial use. You must pay royalties for commercial use.
So basically if someone doesn't agree with them you do not listen to them.
And then you think you have the moral high ground to go around calling others "trolls".
Right.
Vorbis hasn't yet been picked up by a big, fat, juicy target. Patent trolls tend to wait for that before suing. If Apple picked up Vorbis (not bloody likely, but for the sake of argument) and started trumpeting it, you can bet that patent trolls would crawl out of the woodwork.
All should have similar stand
Fuck off. I'm not supporting a patented standard that requires royalties.
No, when people use well established bullshit to support their point of view, I stop listening. That is the case here. As such, I'm tired of morons spewing ignorance and lies to support their holy war of stupidity; as very much seems to be the case here.
All you're managing to do here is show that you are a fanatic who will refuse to even listen to anything you don't already agree with.
At any point, someone not part of the group could pipe up and sue h264 for patent infringement
There are about thirty H.264 licensors and one thousand H.264 licensees, who, collectively, manufacture essentially 100% of the hardware and software used in the chain of high definition television production and distribution from the studio camera to the motion picture theater and home television set.
The licensors include global industrial powers like Mitsubishi, Philips, Samsung and Toshiba.
Even the smallest players here would be considered giants in R&D.
Each and every one dangerous adversaries in court - with virtually unlimited funds to defend their position.
H.265/HEVC should be ready in about a year or two.
Scales well from the smartphone to the 4Kx2K projection screen. Half the bitrate of H.264/WebM for the same perceived video quality.
Some meaningful improvements in color reproduction, sound, etc. Content protection when desired.
The geek is like the general who fights the last war when the new war has already begun.
If you re-encode this will blow the quality and compression ratio with this type of codec. Which pixel size ratio / frame rates? Hmmmm...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
YouTube is Google's product. They can encode their video as dog poo if they want to.
Yeah, this is a case of, "what the hell else do you want?" They blew it as wide open as possible.
I8-D
Thanks - I've been using html5 on Chrome, hadn't known FF4 supported it yet.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In the last few days, I've found that increasing numbers of videos will work ok at 240, maybe or maybe not at 360, and fail at 480. The failure mode is that the image is a big blob of green, maybe with a few red pixels around the edges.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
6 years worth every day? That doesn't make sense.
Or...more realistically, someone who knows you're completely full of shit and have no fucking clue what you're talking about. I even glimpsed at your previous post - absolute lies and bullshit.
You are either a troll or a fucking idiot. Literally. Period.
true, ish.
iRiver were pretty big before iPod took over completely. they've supported vorbis for years.
also, game makers use a lot of vorbis exactly because there's no need to worry about licensing. same deal with bink video (which is kinda not that good but has some unique features).
There is no issue in shipping implementations of h.264 in free systems. Just that nobody wants to pay the licenses.
If you have to pay, it isn't free anymore (in either sense of free).
YouTube is Google's product. They can encode their video as dog poo if they want to.
To match the content you mean?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Its royalty free for non-commercial use. You must pay royalties for commercial use.
Wow, that's pretty fucking evil.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You haven't managed to address a single point I made, though.
Seriously this modded troll,
Troll moderators that's what it is. Google homogenits is what they are.
Actually, I did. Thusly the stupidity comments were born. The fact you have no clue why your comments are stupidity is sad. Your posts are on troll after another. I seriously can't figure out if you really are that stupid or are purposely trolling. Either way, its been answered.
That is fully up to those who want to ship their software. They are allowed to ship freely to anyone. Still they have to pay the license.
Stupid, yes. But that is the legal case here.