All Videos on YouTube Now Serves in WebM Format

Last November, I have put down that 80% YouTube Videos were available in WebM Format. This Tuesday, YouTube announced that all videos on the site have been transcoded to WebM format, which is natively supported by the HTML5 web browsers, including the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome and Opera. So we could watch WebM web videos in browsers without any plugin. Users who used Adobe Flash Player to watch YouTube videos could contiune to watch the H.264 videos.

"Given the massive size of our catalog - nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day - this is quite the undertaking", said James Zern, a Google Software Engineer. So far 30% videos that make up 90% of total views have been transcoded to WebM format. All the transcoding works are being made quietly in the background.

The transcoding is also out of conderation for mobile devices. At present Android and iOS devices have provided full support for HTML5. But H.264 coded Flash videos are not popular on those devices.

Off topic:
To legally download YouTube Flash videos to your computer, you can use Leawo Free YouTube Downloader. It is a free video downloader that can download and convert Flash videos from YouTube and other websites.