The revolution has begun! Web video will be freed from the shackles of the MPEG-LA and the dreaded claws of patents and incomprehensible licenses! Sorry, I got a little carried away there. Anywho, YouTube has announced all new videos uploaded to the site will be transcoded into WebM, and that the most important part of the site’s catalogue is already available in WebM.
In a post on the YouTube blog, James Zern, software engineer at YouTube, announced the news. “All new videos uploaded to YouTube are now transcoded into WebM. WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term,” Zern details, “As we work to transcode more videos into WebM, we hope to reduce the technical incompatibilities that prevent you from accessing video while improving the overall online video landscape.”
It also turns out that the most important part of YouTube’s catalogue has already been transcoded to WebM. So much so, in fact, that YouTube has already transcoded 99% of the site’s views into WebM, or 30% of the total catalogue (yes, we all pretty much watch the same few videos – humans are not snowflakes). This is all done by YouTube’s internet-based video processing infrastructure.
“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,” Zern explains, “As we continue to transcode the remaining inventory, we’ll keep you posted on our progress.”
He further added that YouTube will continue to support H264. “Our goal is to ensure that nothing stands between you and the great content you’ve always enjoyed. We’ll continue to invest in new video technology that improves the experiences for all users, builds a better infrastructure for online video, leads to greater access of information and spurs continued innovation.”
Are you still alive?
What they should do is delete all the H.264 copies of the video’s encoded and then put up a page explaining that IE/Safari/iOS doesn’t support WebM and to switch over to a WebM compliant browser such as Chrome, FireFox or Opera. Thus when people find that youtube doesn’t work in IE anymore and go looking for an answer they come across the prepared page and upgrade to a better and more compliant browser. This will also force those browsers to include support thus making them better for the general public.
Edited 2011-04-20 09:27 UTC
Expected reaction:
IE user blame IE on not supporting youtube, microsoft point again finger in monopoly suit.
Safari user blame google for not supporting safari, Apple fans point finger at google for monopoly suit.
Result:
Not happening anytime soon
they can hardly point fingers when the format is freely available… it would be a different story if they couldn’t interoperate with youtube
Enforcing a bug ridden proprietary plugin with a royalty and patent plagued codec from the MPEG-LA trolls: fine.
Enforcing an open and royalty free codec through HTML5: monopoly suit?
Madness, I tell you.
They could do it fairly soon given that Adobe has committed themselves to providing WebM support in Flash which means even if the end user doesn’t have a browser that supports WebM they can still watch it using the Flash player.
Actually, they committed themselves to VP8 support. WebM support was never mentioned read the fine print:
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2010/05/adobe_support_for_vp8….
My guess is by the end of June, Flash Player 11 be out with VP8 support but you’ll need to use it with one of their proprietary container formats. I hope I’m wrong.
You could be right as far as out of the box support goes, but as long as the decoding is built into flash plugin, you ought to be able to write some actionscript to pull apart a different container and give away the code on the net.
The average youtube user (considering the top viewed video) unfortunately don’t care wether a codec is free or not.
No they wont, but thats is why people elect other smarter people to manage them. this takes the form of Governments, boards and DEVELOPERS. If the devs of youtube turn off h.264 then the people will see that and either look for a solution or pester microsoft, who will be forced to include the WebM codec and not just have it as an option
…or they’ll switch to another content source that isn’t being a pain in the ass for them. Sites rise very quickly on the web, youtube being one of them, but it’s important we not forget that they fall just as swiftly.
You’ve would have my vote. If I didn’t commented first.
The average YouTube website owner, however, very much does care.
That’s crazy internet armchair quarterback analysis.
What would really happen:
IE users don’t view youtube, google loses advertising money.
Safari don’t view youtube, google loses advertising money.
Users of older firefox browsers don’t view youtube, google loses advertising money.
Google won’t do that because it will cost Google money.
hey this is internet, and being crazy here avoid me being mad in the real world (and eventually show up at work with a chainsaw/shotgun/spoon/insert favorite weapon here ).
However I like your more pragmatic analysis, I sometimes forget how google love to make money with our eyeballs.
They will sooner or later stop encoding new videos into H.264 forcing the switch.
IE9 users won’t have a problem:
http://tools.google.com/dlpage/webmmf
It won’t be long before Google releases this Media Foundation codec for Windows 7 and Vista, and also they are working on a similar installable codec for OSX, so Safari on Macs also won’t have a problem.
IE9 is a half-way decent browser. I know that there are people on this site who will murder me for saying such but for the normal 90% of use cases, its fine. It may not support every html5 tag out there BUT how many site would a AVERAGE user visit that include heavy html5 usage. It’s not the main concern, IE6-8 users are.
Agreed.
IE8 is currently sitting at about 30% of browsers in use.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201104-201104…
The next highest is Firefox 3.6 with about 20%, but Firefox 3.6 cannot do WebM. However, Firefox 4 is already starting to gain significant share, coming in at 7%. Because it is such a worthwhile upgrade, I would imagine that the majority of Firefox 3.6 users will switch over to Firefox 4 within the month. This would give Firefox 4 up to 25% share, which is 5% shy of IE8.
Firefox 4 (which can guess will reach 25% within a month or so) can do WebM. The next browser after that is Chrome 10, with 16%, then IE7, with 8.5%.
OK, so that brings non-HTML5 browsers IE7 and IE8 up to say 39%, and the highest two HTML5 browsers (within a month or so) up to 41%.
So, within a month or so, on current trends, 80% of browsers will be split between two versions of IE which cannot do HTML5 at all, and two browsers (Chrome 10 and Firefox 4) which can do HTML5/WebM (but not HTML5/h264).
The fortunate thing is that if IE7 or IE8 users do want to visit HTML5 websites, it is the easiest thing for them to simply install either Firefox 4 or Chrome 10, and hey presto they are good to go.
Edited 2011-04-20 11:51 UTC
That depends. I tried to upgrade to Firefox 4.0 a week or two ago but ended up switching back to 3.6 after spending two hours tracking down an addon-related bug and discovering that, on a fresh profile, it was triggered by a very specific mix of over a dozen different addons I wasn’t willing to give up.
I kept records, so if they don’t release a 4.0.1 that fixes it, maybe I’ll try to muddle my way through gdb to figure out what causes it one my exams are over.
Of course, I also have a copy of Chromium I can always fire up if need be.
There are 400 million Firefox users, you are not 25% of browser users.
However, amongst the 7% of browser users who have by now taken up Firefox 4, some like you in rare circumstances have noticed bugs, and have reported them back to Mozilla.
http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2011/04/mozilla-firefox-401-no…
Mozilla Firefox 4.0.1 now in Beta
So there you go. It should be ready for release in a short time.
Edited 2011-04-20 12:45 UTC
Just saying non-trivial numbers of users may stay back for a release or two.
4.0 changed a LOT under the hood and new code always brings new bugs.
Chrome users all get upgraded by Google without their consent.
At least Firefox gives you the choice to upgrade.
Bear in mind that Firefox 4 IS a compelling upgrade.
PS: Also bear in mind that as of now: “All New YouTube Uploads Transcoded to WebM” so Firefox users will need Firefox 4.
Edited 2011-04-20 13:01 UTC
That, among other reasons, is why, on the occasions when I use something other than Firefox, I run Chromium on Gentoo Linux. It’s my system. Nothing changes without my explicit, instance-by-instance consent and from-source builds up the risk and lower the reward of upstream devs trying anything sneaky.
I’m well aware that it’s a compelling upgrade though. It took a lot of work to hack my Firefox 3.6 to look and behave like Chrome’s compact UI and that still doesn’t give me a Javascript method JIT, deferred DOM updates, or any of the various other deep core tweaks.
I just value a comfortable, if slightly sluggish browser more than a browser that’s compelling but only works if I sacrifice features I value highly.
As for needing Firefox 4, I doubt it. They said they’ll keep making H.264 versions and Flash is both H.264-capable and almost ubiquitous.
The reason there aren’t more sites out there with heavy html5 usage is precisely because many of those average users have browsers which would be unable to render them. IE has been stifling web innovation for years, and continues to do so.
I think this has more to do with the fact that the html5 standard ISNT FINISHED and every different engine has its own way of displaying certain tags and no engine supports exactly the same tags as every other engine. Thus when designing a page that is intended to be used by people using all sorts of browsers devs build the site in html4 to make sure that everyone gets the same experience. Thats not to say that there aren’t devs who didn’t build because of your reason, it just unlikely that that was the main reason
Not so much that it isn’t finished – more that what people call HTML5 for the most part is not actually HTML5. CSS3, Geolocation, the file api, localDb, simpleWebDb, offline Storage, microData, canvas3D, etc. etc. – none of these technologies are strictly part of HTML5, they are their own individual specs.
HTML5 itself is primarily the new tags (video, audio, article, etc.) plus canvas support. A browser claiming HTML5 support only has to implement this subset to be compliant. True that it is not technically “finished”, but it is pretty stable now.
The issue is in reality there are progressive browser engines (webkit, opera, and gecko) and then there is trident (IE). The progressive engines are more or less about the business of proposing, creating, and implementing new APIs by actually building and releasing them. They cooperate with each other. That is after all how this stuff gets done – you don’t propose an API and then have committee meetings for a year or two until everyone is happy – you spec and build it and let the standard evolve through cross-implementations (assuming everyone likes the spec). The standard “falls out” of the implementation once things stabilize between engines.
Microsoft used to do that to some degree, but they more or less did it only in one direction and always liked dealing from a position of power. They spec and implement, and then they would say “we like this, you should do it too”. If no one else agreed they would happily ignore everyone else and go their own way. And they mostly ignored what everyone else agreed was better solutions to the same problems unless developers screamed bloody murder and they would eventually come around and implement – but they always kept all the crud they built up with their proprietary extensions. They actually encouraged their developers to use their extensions to achieve lock-in.
That is how they ended up with the pile of sh*t that pre-IE9 versions of the engine was. They did not actually participate as an equal because they has such large market share they believed they could dictate by fiat where things would go. They finally figured out they were wrong with IE9.
Imo, they are being cautious with what new specs they implement because they do not want to implement experimental stuff that will end up being a dead end (for example localDb – firefox and chrome both support this, but everyone agrees is is a dead end and wont go anywhere). They are no longer trying to be too progressive either. I think Microsoft being cautious at this point is the smart thing to do, let the other engines hash out the experimental stuff and then implement once things have settled down enough where it is obvious that said feature has legs and is relatively stable. It sucks as a developer because IE will tend to always be a bit behind the curve, but imo that is MUCH better than it being just plain broken (like all pre-IE9 versions were) and actively encouraging developers to embrace new “features” that end up being dead ends in the long run.
The difference with experimental features in the more progressive engines is they rarely implement anything unless there is a strong belief that the other vendors will follow – none of them want to implement a feature that is proprietary to their engine. They want consensus eventually, but will implement to prove it out. This is totally different from what MS used to do – they just did whatever they wanted and f*ck everyone else.
Which is how it should be. Default rendering behavior is only mostly similar in HTML4 because of many years of tweaking to get it that way. The same will probably happen with HTML5, but the standard is not about making everything look the same – it is about making everything mean the same thing. CSS gives you enough control for modern stuff to get pixel perfect rendering, but that is up to you as a developer to use if you want to. Not everyone (or even most people) care about pixel perfect rendering across different engines.
There is nothing about HTML4 that makes it any better in this regard other than its age. I’m not saying your wrong at all, just that it isn’t the standard that caused this – it was a slow process between all the engines to converge on a mostly uniform rendering behavior across user agents. I’m just stressing the point because the standard (either 4 or 5) does not dictate this kind of stuff, and as a developer you would be better off to either do layouts that don’t require such precise rendering, or using CSS to force it. Relying on the user agents to do the same thing by default will never work in the long run…
I think HTML5 will get used more as it becomes necessary. By that I mean when you want some feature on your site that necessitates either a) do some crazy roll your own implementation -or- b) HTML5 already offers some API that will do most of it for you or at least help you greatly – most devs will chose (b). But if you don’t need it, there isn’t much point using it yet.
I do HTML5 sites – if you are strictly talking about the new tags it is easy enough to get good behavior across all the major browsers (even IE6), but it requires css and javascript shims for the older browsers. Nothing complex, but a new experience for a lot of developers.
except HTML5 is all those things. so… yeah.
Want to elaborate a wee bit? Not sure what you are getting at… The HTML5 spec is viewable on the w3c site, and it does not include, nor will it include, anything outside of the markup language itself. The plan going forward is to keep Apis not directly related to markup outside of the “standard” and track them under separate working groups.
Shoving off h.264 isn’t that far away.
Remember how Adobe announced long, long ago that they’d support WebM in Flash? If they’d finally make true on that promise, YouTube could very well just switch off h.264 support without affecting it’s user-base.
…save for most current-gen mobile phones and tablets which can’t view WebM videos either because their manufacturer is stubborn and no one can do the job for them (iOS and WP7 devices) or because devices do not get updated to the latest firmware (Android devices without Flash)
So a few more years to wait…
Edited 2011-04-20 16:17 UTC
it’s not because the manufacturer is stubborn. last i checked they don’t even make a hardware decoder for webm. which is why google shouldn’t force webm down everyones throats. it’s not like webm isn’t covered by patents. as long as youtube keeps supporting h.264 while we have phones and devices that can decode it, then i’m ok with this.
i personally think they should just use h.264 for everything. 1. patents don’t last forever. 2. h.264 has broad hardware support. from blueray players, to tablets and android phones, iphone, car stereos. 3. i know some people are like, but firefox wont include h.264. well then that’s what plugins are for.
I personally think people should use WebM for the web (which BTW has nothing to do with blueray players or car stereos).
Patents will last longer than h264 does.
There is better support (without plugins) in browsers for WebM than h264.
Not only Firefox won’t include h264, neither will Opera or Chrome.
There is a WebM Media Foundation codec available from Google so that if this codec is installed then even IE9 can support WebM without a plugin.
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/application-development/2011/03/16/goog…
They’re coming.
Which patents are those, and more importantly, are they held by anyone other than Google? Without specific patents, its a bit-o-FUD.
If I can use a patent, without paying a license fee I have no problem with it. But If I do have to pay, then well the amount of time the patent lasts very much does matter. Its like saying you pay taxes only while you’re alive.
I’m willing to bet that there will be broad hardware support for WebM before there the patents will expire on h264.
Edited 2011-04-21 21:31 UTC
Or a link to the codec download page.
Safari and IE use the system codecs. They support it as long as it’s installed on the system.
Don’t you mean IE/Safari/iOS/Android (pre-2.3.3 – i.e. the vast majority of devices)
I have been using the html5 version of youtube for a while now, and I must say, i can’t really notice any difference, except for less CPU usage.
For youtube videos no one will notice a difference anyway, and webm is from an ideology standpoint the better choice.
people will notice when they can no longer play the vids. This is particularly true on ‘alternative’ OS where the browsers might not be updated to support the new format.
Ok, I know its a small minority, but its annoying none the less.
When YouTube first began, people would visit the site for the first time and many would see no videos. The site would explain that they needed a plug-in for their browser, and it gave a link to Adobe’s Flash Player.
When YouTube moves to WebM, people using Firefox 4, Opera, Chrome or Chromium (on any OS) will have no such a problem. People who are using IE9 or Safari … would see a message that they needed a codec for their system, and they would be given a link to Google’s codec download site.
The preliminary version of which is here:
http://www.webmproject.org/code/#webm-repositories
Where is there a problem?
Edited 2011-04-20 10:46 UTC
I would like to know what you classify as ‘alternate’. Linux, BSD and most Unix variations can get the up-to-date browsers easily. Those of you using Haiku, i think there are updated browsers available, but not being a haiku user i am not quite sure. Any other ‘alternate’ OS’s will either have a compiled version OR you OS is soo old that you really should upgrade or atleast have one under a virtual machine.
As opposed to those alternative OSs with full Flash support?
People on such alternative platforms almost certainly don’t have flash and might not have an h.264 decoder, and even if they do its probably not correctly licensed…
At least with WebM, it becomes relatively easy to bring support for it to these alternative platforms, and you can bet that such support will be rapidly ported to any platform still seeing active development.
There is some difference: Flash is hardware accelerated while Webm is not.
Really?. What is hardware accelerated in flash? video decompression pipeline, scalling? On which operating systems and what hardware?
It is strange, but on my machine webm works much better, so i can watch now HD content, or other much more smoother (fullframerate instead of the slideshow and killing whole computer), and better integrated in to the webpage (including resizing, scrolling issues in flash, keyboard and mouse hijacking by flash).
Why would they *not* use their own codec…? It’s not really a surprise. That they use their own technology, that happens all the time – but it in no way means anything really. Not really. It’s a step in a specific direction, but what counts is when the “flood” begins and every other site moves to WebM.
Google should buy vimeo and a couple of the other more popular sites and do the same as well
If youtube do it, then chances are the rest will follow. Google will have WebM all over the internet without having to pay a cent.
Thom you again use “opensource” and “open” interoperably when the only ones who actually believe that are those who really think they’re not paying “royalties” for video on YouTube if it’s in WebM format.
http://www.webmproject.org/code/specs/container/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP8
If you can read AND comprehand them, and still believe WebM is open, I have a nice bridge I’d like to sell you.
Opensource != open
Google are sitting back and laughing all the way to the bank with a barely audible chant of “come in suckers” playing in the background, and rightfully so – the suckers have taken the bait hook, line and sinker. Welcome to the new Google RDF…
Wooa, getting a very high reading on the Troll-O-Meter there…
Are you going to back up your accusations with some facts instead of pasting some links?
WTF???????
Here is the documentation for WebM:
http://www.webmproject.org/code/specs/
The spec has been submitted to the ITEF
http://www.ietf.org/
Here is the license for WebM:
http://www.webmproject.org/license/
Here is what the specification says about the license, it happens to be the exact same text as appears in the license itself:
http://www.webmproject.org/license/bitstream/
Anyone may use, anyone may implement, full permission is granted irrevocably and in perpetuity (as long as you don’t sue Google).
How is this not open? On what planet?
Your challenge is to explain how this is not open.
Edited 2011-04-20 10:50 UTC
Yes, you can argue that OpenSource is not necessarily open, and you’re right.
Yet, it is irrelevant, WebM is open source, is free (as in beer) and free (as in freedom). While this benefits Google a lot (because it is their format), it also benefits browser developers, operating system developers, web designers, web developers and the users themselves, as there are no royalties to be paid for either making or seeing an encoded video.
Yes, Google could change their policies and start changing for the worse, but even if it happens, the previous version of the video format (VP8) and the audio and container formats (Vorbis and Matroska) are completely free and OpenSource. Thus, the web could keep an open format.
Furthermore, it is in Google’s interest that the format is open, so all browsers and OSes can implement it and the maximum amount of users can use the formats on Google’s sites.
No, you cannot read the actual license terms for WebM and argue that. Not if you want to retain any logic at all.
No, Google cannot do that … what part of “perpetual, no-charge, royalty-free and irrevocable” did you fail to understand?
Edited 2011-04-20 12:57 UTC
You do not understand copyright licenses and the clauses in WebM license: they cannot retroactively change license terms for the code and software that has already been released, only for NEW releases. Even if Google somehow, in theory, did change the license some day in the future all the code that is already in the wild will still have the old license and thus it’d just get forked.
Besides, the license itself clearly does say that Google cannot change the license, they’ve deliberately barred themselves from doing that.
Ups, I wasn’t clear enough. That is exactly what would allow the web to use previous versions of VP8, Vorbis and Matroska together, as in my example, I just wasn’t clear enough.
I did not know that. WebM uses the BSD license, am I correct? (I remember the previous modified BSD license regarding the patents, but they removed the extra clause)
Here are the various licenses for different aspects of WebM, read them for yourself:
http://www.webmproject.org/license/
There are different licenses for different aspects of involvement with WebM. If you want to contribute to Google’s software implementation of WebM, there are contributor licenses for individuals and for corporations.
If you want to write your own implementation, then your code is your code and it is not subject to Google’s permission for Google’s WebM codebase. The only thing you need to worry about if you want to write your own code is permission to use the WebM bitstream format. The license terms for that are, in essence, as follows:
http://www.webmproject.org/license/bitstream/
“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 where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification.”
Note in particular the use of the words “irrevocable” and “perpetual”.
Edited 2011-04-21 03:01 UTC
You can define open to mean what every you want and then claim what ever you dislike is not open. That doesn’t tend to influence people with critical reasoning skills, especially when your dislike is dripping from each word you write.
@ mrhasbean
Its seems you have a chip on your shoulder about Google and WebM. I have moderated your comments up in the past cause you do make sense in a lot of your posts. However when the subject is google or webM/vp8 then you tend to troll with comments not backed by any merit of reality and/or facts which is why you get justly modded down.
So instead of WebM being 100% more attractive to end users/content producers/etc than H.264, it’s only 99.99999% more attractive? Thanks for clearing that up.
War is peace
Slavery is freedom
Ignorance is strength
Makes sense now. I was wonder why, suddenly, Youtube videos were using 50% less CPU than Hulu videos. I guess this answers the question.
Edited 2011-04-20 12:41 UTC
As soon as a decent number of Android phones have hardware-accelerated WebM, you can bet Google will be turning off the h.264.
Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) both support WebM.
The Nvidia Tegra 2 chip and the Rockchip RK29xx chips both support WebM decoding in hardware. The Tegra 2 supports WebM encoding in hardware also.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-2.html
Many of the Android tablets which are just coming out, such as the Motorola Xoom, utilise the Nvidia Tegra 2 chip.
Edited 2011-04-20 13:49 UTC
These are tablets rather than phones, but nevertheless here is an article describing some of these devices:
http://www.techdrivein.com/2011/04/8-android-tablets-for-2011-to-be…
Only two of these eight tablets (the Panasonic Viera and the Lenovo LePad) will not ship with support for WebM. All of the others will ship with support for WebM, and it appears most would feature hardware support for webM.
No, that won’t do it:
As soon as the cost of maintaining h.264 outweighs the ad revenue as a result of keeping it, you can bet they’ll turn it off (and potentially free up tons of space in their cloud storage).
As long as they’re still making ad revenue from people watching the videos, they’ll keep it around, unless the license fees and storage costs outweigh said ad revenue. This basically comes down to a simple revenue/expense ratio business decision.
After all, the revolution will not be televised.
I passionately *HATE* Flash Player technologies. Using Fedora 14 and Chrome, and constantly experiencing Chrome crash (libflashplayer.so plugin failed), I can’t stand one more day with this cursed hellish plugin! No 64-bit! No stability!
Finally finally… Anything BUT FLASH!
Not surprised Thom decided to ignore this information.
I haven’t had the time yet to do that story yet. I have a life, you know.
Sheesh.
No problem. I actually didn’t expect you to write a full story, but more of a blurb.
If you haven’t yet, I recommend writing something up and submitting the story – that seems to help when you want some news posted here
Actually, WebM was in the ‘stable’ release for quiet a while now. I know for certain it is in Chrome 10, which Wikipedia says was released on: 2011-03-08
It’d be pretty easy to say that on OSX, what webkit does doesn’t matter, because people can choose anything but Safari and they’ll get excellent webM support.
As long as they haven’t ported it to iOS, nothing new.
But well… That would be needlessly jerkish.
I wouldn’t call it well-known information.
Awesome to know though. It means I can watch the open standards videos using my favorite browser.
The catch of course is that you have to enable the HTML5 player yourself by going to youtube.com/html5 otherwise YouTube will serve you Flash, even if you have a modern browser (say Firefox 4).
I think YouTube should detect the browser and serve HTML5 automatically.
Oh, and most graphics cards DON’T have hardware support for WebM, so the evil H.264 content served through the “hog” known as Flash Player (which is now hardware accelerated) will actually do better in terms of CPU usage…
Edited 2011-04-21 16:18 UTC
Well, I’ve done some test, with latest Flash vs HTML5 on Firefox 4/Fedora 14 x86_64, using the 720p version of the following video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLxQiI8c1Bs
The results are that CPU usage is aprox. the same when the video is at maximal size (full screen for flash, full tab for WebM). For some reasons (inefficient blitting probably), Flash eats up a lot more CPU when windowed vs in full screen (25% more).
So if we believe you when you say that Flash uses GPU acceleration whereas HTML5 <video> implementations do not use it (and I tend to believe it as full screen flash video was unbearably slow until 10.1 where they introduced some GPU-accelerated operations), this means that Flash can still be considered a resource hog, and in particular a major battery hog, as it turns on the power sink that a GPU is without using less CPU time at all.
If only I could monitor power usage to check that…
Edited 2011-04-21 17:31 UTC
Not yet, but since both AMD and NVIDIA are backing WebM you can bet your arse that it won’t take long before WebM support is baked in. Not to mention that the list includes also Qualcomm, ARM, DSP Group, Freescale and TI which are all fairly well-known mobile chipset makers.. In fact, many DSP chips for example are programmable and can support hardware decoding, it is only the OS maker that then decides whether they’ll ship the necessary upates.
In my (albeit brief) tests I am getting slightly less CPU-time consumed when watching WebM than when watching H.264 via Flash. Given that the same seems to apply to many other users here I’d say that atleast on the desktop the situation is pretty darn good even without acceleration.
I agree, however it’s weird that when other sites embed youtube videos they automatically serve webm for me (using Firefox 4). I know this since I don’t have flash (or gnash) installed and yet for the past couple of weeks I’ve been able to watch pretty much all embedded youtube videos on sites that I visit without me having ‘opted in’ for html5 on youtube.
That’s the new iframe embed code which went live a few weeks ago. Before that, it was an optional checkbox (I’ve been using it on OSN for months).
It is not true that all new uploaded video is encoded in webm.
Go here: http://www.youtube.com/results?uploaded=d&search_query=trailer&sear…
(simly “trailer” search, from today with time sorting).
First result, (about 20 minutes ago), is not encoded using webm. I probably need to wait a bit until it will be encoded using webm. Not very good.
All your upload now belong to us!
I don’t know if this has been mentioned but you can enable html5 including webm on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/html5
Hello, any idea if this html webm format saves mobile broadband 3G bandwidth for verizon and att and customer, and by what factor ? I have limited 3G bandwidth. Any plans to make this default in Google Chrome and Android for youtube etc ?
WebM does not save bandwidth per se, AFAIK, it’s rather a different compromise between quality and bandwidth.
As WebM videos look better for the average user at equal bandwidth (better-looking artifacts), it’s possible to use lower bandwidth.
well done google !
free and open standards is the way to go!