From now on, any video you upload to YouTube will be transcoded into Google’s WebM codec, joining the “videos that make up 99 per cent of views on the site or nearly 30 per cent of all videos”. Google explains it to the non-tech savvy folk like so:
Oh wow. Google’s dropping support for h.264 video in Chrome, because, they say, they’re only going to support “open codec technologies”:
In a blogpost titled “Flash and the HTML5 tag”, YouTube has detailed its (slightly fence-sitting) thoughts on the ever-present Adobe Flash/HTML5 issue, saying that while both offer pluses, it’s really Google’s own WebM project that we need. [YouTube]
Google hopes to sidestep the entire HTML5 video debate with a new, open source, royalty free format called WebM. But will Apple ever support it? Judging by to the latest missive from Steve’s iPad, things don’t look great.
