Google Starts Converting YouTube Videos To Open Source Format

Saturday, April 23, 2011:  Google has announced in a blog post that it has started to convert its huge catalogue of YouTube videos to the open source format, WebM. Earlier, the videos supported H.264, which is majorly backed by Apple. Since Apple does not allow Adobe's Flash in its iPod touch, iPhone or the iPad, the only way to watch videos via YouTube when on Apple mobile device is to use the codec H.264.

As of now, around 30 per cent of the videos on YouTube have been converted to the WebM format. To speed up the process of transcoding, Google has been utilising its famed cloud infrastructure, whenever they are free. Whenever there is too much traffic or users need to upload content, the WebM transcoding is paused.

But it isn't like Google is totally abandoning the H.264 format as it plans to continue it in the near time to come. H.264 is also more popular since its offers hardware acceleration which is still non-existent in the WebM format.