If the good guy gets the girl, it's rated PG; if the bad guy gets the girl, it's rated R; and if everybody gets the girl, it's rated X - Kirk Douglas
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Youtube adopts WebM for all new videos
VIDEO STREAMING OUTFIT Youtube has effectively struck a heavy blow against Adobe's Flash video format by saying that all new videos uploaded to its servers will be transcoded into WebM format.
Google has been sponsoring the development of the open WebM format that uses the VP8 video codec and Vorbis audio streams. The format has gained significant support with Mozilla's Firefox 4, Opera 10.6 and Google's Chrome web browsers all natively supporting WebM playback. With Youtube announcing that all future videos will be in WebM format, that should put pressure on other web browsers such as Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer to natively support the format.
Youtube's decision to move videos over to the WebM format will reduce the popularity of Adobe's Flash video format. Google has also announced that it is slowly trawling through Youtube's considerable video library converting videos previously stored in Flash video into WebM format. It claims to have already transcoded 30 per cent of all videos on Youtube into WebM, though it is focusing on the most popular ones first.
Aside from switching to the open WebM format, Youtube re-affirmed its commitment to developing its HTML5 video player. The HTML5 video tag supports a number of formats including WebM's VP8 video codec.
Given Youtube's standing in the video streaming market, the format it chooses to adopt will most likely become one that sticks. With its adoption of WebM, it looks like Adobe's grip on the web is loosening and with it the dependency on Adobe's proprietary Flash software. µ
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They don's say they are 'switching to' but that they ALSO make everything WebM, and even specify they will continue to support h.264.
So how it will go in the future nobody knows, but I imagine since flash has more and more DRM and youtube now wants to more and more do paid content that they would have a hard time to use a format without DRM, or what?
I guess they could try to wait until a few people use their paid stuff then announce that 'on popular request to our paid customers we now have added DRM to WebM, yay'...
I must say, 2-3 months ago, their HTML5 player was near useless, breaking on every second video played.
Now I prefer it over flash. The 2-step fullscreen function is awesome (clicking fullscreen goes to full window, then pressing F11 goes to fullscreen). It's much better than flash, which delivers a postage-stamp on my dual-screen Xorg desktop.
With the advent of Vorbis, I may even be able to listen to Music on youtube without cringing.
TL;DR: On Linux, HTML5 Flash.
Thank you, Google, for having the stones to do this. They're not perfect, but this goes a long way to ensuring a truly Free Web, and they deserve our praise for that. Software patents *restrain* innovation; they don't encourage it, and any proprietary format (including patent-encumbered H.264) is a trap.
Now, hi-def video does take some decent computer resources to play. That means a modern video card and CPU, because your 933 MHz Pentium-III with its S3 Trio64 video card just ain't gonna cut it anymore. I've got a recent vintage quad-core with a good video board, and I have no problem playing hi-def WebM videos.
--SYG
I think your computer needs more work.
just tested html5 on opera 11.10 and firefox 4. 720p is a slideshow and there's no full screen. i'll stick with flash for now