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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?
If I had to venture a guess, somewhere around April 1st next year.
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.
Actually its been around for a while While
When are we going to get YouTube in 3d?
Youtube is already in 3D, and has been for some time. You can find 3D videos with this search:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=yt3d%3Aenable%3Dtrue&search=tag
3D videos have an additional '3D' menu at the bottom, to select the type of 3D output preferred.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Help! Help! Someone is trying to give me something for free!
Fact: Google is a huge company whose services are used by MANY people
Highly likely: Whatever format Google choose for YouTube will become extremely popular.
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.
Seriously, why does this meme just keep going round and round?
computers/phones already have hardware capable of decoding WebM - it's the same hardware used to decode h.264! In most cases all that is/will be needed is a firmware update.
Android phones will obviously be there first - it's already available in Gingerbread. 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.
Don't you wish you hadn't wasted 3 seconds of your life reading this sig?
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
It's more intensive in terms of software decoding than the current best H.264 decoders. I am not aware of any software that can do hardware decoding of VP8 video on current, common GPUs.
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.
You seem to be somewhat uninformed as well. WebM indeed is a "narrowed" Matroska container format. The video stream however is NOT a H.264 but VP8, and ONLY VP8. Google chose to narrow down the Matroska and call it WebM precisely because they wanted to avoid having a format on the loose on the Web that could include any type of video stream. And so chose to limit video to VP8 and audio to Ogg Vorbis. Basically if you have a .webm file, the video (if any) it carries MUST be a VP8 stream, and the audio (if any, again) MUST be a Vorbis stream.
Google bought On2 Technologies which developed VP8. The latter is comparable to H.264 with pretty much any kind of motion and bitrates. There are subjective perception tests on the Web dating back at least two years, when the debate on VP8 vs. H.264 and open video was heating up.
Some brands that include the OGG playback feature in their products: SanDisk, Cowon, Trekstor, HTC, Archos, Grundig, iRiver, Philips, Samsung... Pretty neat for a "zero penetration" format ;) BTW, many of them also support FLAC.
exp(i*pi)+1=0
Where does it say they're dropping H.264 from YouTube?
YouTube stores videos in a bunch of formats, and the client negotiates the best format for the current situation. It will keep delivering h.264 to you. It will have the option of delivering WebM to clients that are better at displaying that. Everybody's happy.
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?
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 ]
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.
Actually, VP8 uses many of the same techniques to encode video as h264, it is just implemented in a different way. The techniques themselves aren't patented, just the ways of using them, which is firmware not hardware trouble (well, depending how the h264 acceleration hardware was written).
Now, I'm not intimately aware of the details of the two codecs, and they may likely use similar operations, but for them to be patent independent would require significant differences in their implementation.
The infamous article 377 shows that VP8 is just MPEG-4 AVC with the patented parts ripped out. So yes, any DSP that can handle MPEG-4 AVC should be able to handle VP8 with a minor rewrite of the bitstream parser.
No. No, you couldn't
Okay. I'm not an iPod user, so I don't know everything.
'But your post is screaming "I bought an iPod, but it won't play Vorbis, that means Vorbis is baaaad". You got what you bought, and you bought what you had chosen. Bashing Vorbis in this matter is stupid.
Of the tests that are floating around the internet, WebM is comparable to H264 base or main, but not high (the different profiles are almost like different codecs, requiring more features as you get higher). Considering pretty much no phones can play high, or maybe even main, the quality comparison is kind of moot, unless you roll multiple versions of the video for different devices.
But no, the one of the advantages of WebM is that it is patent free (there is always a chance of submarine patents though, same with theora, although since VP8 was originally made by a company it is hoped that the patent pool is complete). The other advantage is that it doesn't cost money to use it. Currently it costs a few million dollars per year to buy the rights to distribute a program with the h264 codec, if you look at mozilla for example, this is a significant fraction of the money they raise each year. Currently anybody is free to distribute h264 video, but MPEG-LA could change this at anytime (although, it would be a very bad move if they did). So you have a codec is irrevocably free, or something that requries money to distribute codecs of and could cost money to distribute videos in.
Android natively supports vorbis. that is a LOT of market penetration right there. As of 4th quarter 2010, 32.9 million androids phones had been sold, and the sales rate is only increasing.
The interface is terrible of course, but winamp for android clears that up nicely. The sound quality is actually pretty damn decent, and it can even drive my Beyerdynamic DT880 600ohm cans to a reasonable volume. The only reason I even still bother with my rockbox'd ipod is because it has more storage space than my droid.
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?
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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.