Anyone wanting to try hosting their own HD or SD video portfolio in WebM can try http://www.vive.ly/ which is like parts of Dropbox, Zencoder, and Hulu in a blender, for original video files you want backed up, encoded, and published publicly or privately -- without the YouTube problems of giving up your copyrights or having competitor videos promoted alongside yours.
Drop your originals in a folder, we encode into SD and HD in H.264, Ogg, and WebM, and build you a mini-Hulu video site that works in Flash, Silverlight, or HTML5 across browsers. You can also download the encoded files for use elsewhere, embed them, or rebrand the video site with your own logo and domain name.
Use our Hacker News invite code hd4yc to sign up free, and let us know what you think of the WebM encodes. We encode all the files in parallel, and the video pages update as the versions become available, so you may have to wait a bit for the WebM encodes to finish.
Love it, I want to share your site as a quick tip on our show http://rowshow.com. On Thursday. Can you hook me up with a promo code to give out to viewers? Email in my profile.
I assume you're either the founder or work for Vively--do you have a contact email or phone number? I have a few questions about this this service and how it might be useful for my company's customers.
"Currently, there are countless devices used to record videos and hundreds of different video file formats."
H.264 is by far the most common. I don't know of any video camera or DSLR that records to WebM or Theora.
"certain web browsers that you use to view video online only accept certain ‘codecs’ - or programs used to encode, transmit and playback video files - and others require plug-ins (converters) to integrate the video file with the browser."
"Certain web browsers"? Chrome and Firefox are the only ones that don't support H.264 natively. To view video on those browsers, it needs to be routed through a plug-in like Flash (standard on Chrome) or QuickTime. Browsers like Internet Explorer and Safari support the majority of all web video, right out of the box, no plug-ins needed. On mobile devices, the situation is even more obvious. Android is the only OS with support for WebM, and no mobile devices have hardware acceleration for WebM, draining your device's battery in no-time. However, all modern smartphones and tablets have support for H.264, most of them with hardware acceleration.
I'm all for an open source alternative to H.264. If it's at least as good and free to use, then I hope that it will become the standard; for the web, in desktop operating systems, for mobile devices, for video cameras and DSLRs. I'm just not convinced WebM is that alternative. It's unclear whether WebM is as good as H.264, and it's unclear whether it's free to use.
So just when most people started to finally standardize around one, we're going to introduce a new one that's already opposed by some of the most important players in the industry.
In the last 24 hours, we've had 12 years of video uploaded to Justin.tv. 12.17 in particular. So more than double YouTube :-)
Think about it this way: if you have an average of 365 people uploading a video at any given time, you get 1 year of video per day. So YouTube probably has around 2,000 people uploading a video at any given time. (Compare to the number of channels on Justin.tv at any given time...)
It will be interesting to see if there's a noticeable quality difference. Right now WebM is not comprable to H.264 except the baseline codec.
Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term - This line doesn't jive at all with my understanding of the VP8 codec. I thought implementations were left to devs, but the format was locked and didn't have room to be improved on? Either way the whole spec seems to be built around avoiding H.264 patent suite and "improving" on it is a minefield.
"Right now WebM is not comparable to H.264 except the baseline codec."
It's comparable in the sense that AAC and MP3 are comparable. VP8 can look excellent, it's just that high profile h264 can look better at the same bitrate.
It's also extremely likely that youtube uses h264 baseline profile anyway, since they serve to mobile devices (unless they secretly transcode and store multiple h264 versions for every video).
From comments DarkShikari gave (http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377), it looks like the format was frozen as soon as they released it, so that talk of "improving the format" is rather dubious.
The HTML5 trial has always been opt-in, but also features H.264 files. WebM has been the default for HTML5 since they introduced it, only falling back to H.264 if WebM is not available (or back to Flash if the video require adverts).
I think the big change is that they're now converting all uploads to WebM, previously they had to be above 720p OR uploaded in WebM to trigger this. Presumably because they've converted enough of the popular "classic" videos that they can now spare the encode time for all new files. Just another milestone on the journey towards having everything in WebM.
The summary is that new videos are being transcoded to WebM, whereas the rest is going to take a while. The fact that the transcoding is already partially underway and I haven't noticed any difference probably speaks well for how the transition has been going (admittedly, I generally keep my browsers very up-to-date). EDIT: Aaah, just noticed the opt-in part.
It's good they're doing this, but since I've switched to a browser with WebM support a few months ago, and opted-in to the trial, I've run across only a couple of videos not in WebM.
So far we’ve already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site
or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM
There really isn't much of a long tail on YouTube, it seems. It's sort of worrisome that google could throw away seventy percent of the videos with the vast majority of users not caring.
The vast majority of video views (99%) would be unaffected but that doesn't imply that the vast majority of users wouldn't be since most users are going to view way more than one video.
I don't see any implication that YouTube/Google is throwing away anything. They stated that they chose to transcode a selection of videos that the vast majority of viewers view. They didn't imply that they weren't going to transcode the remaining videos, but that they feel the number of videos that they have transcoded is sufficient enough to declare WebM as being the default codec.
Really, that statement isn't any more worrisome than the unstated fact that Google could potentially delete every video on YouTube and every single email in Gmail and Google Apps on a whim.
From a content provider point of view, there is no point in creating WebM content. The H264 version works on all plateforms, why would they be interested in paying for transcoding time to access a market they have already...
It might sound great, but I do not see the industry following Google on that...
[+] [-] Terretta|15 years ago|reply
Drop your originals in a folder, we encode into SD and HD in H.264, Ogg, and WebM, and build you a mini-Hulu video site that works in Flash, Silverlight, or HTML5 across browsers. You can also download the encoded files for use elsewhere, embed them, or rebrand the video site with your own logo and domain name.
Use our Hacker News invite code hd4yc to sign up free, and let us know what you think of the WebM encodes. We encode all the files in parallel, and the video pages update as the versions become available, so you may have to wait a bit for the WebM encodes to finish.
[+] [-] codejoust|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dusing|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deltaqueue|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onwardly|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymous246|15 years ago|reply
> I can show my visitors up to 12,000 minutes of streaming video > I can upload & process up to 600 minutes of new video
Second what do you mean by "you pay only once"?
[+] [-] Samuel_Michon|15 years ago|reply
"Currently, there are countless devices used to record videos and hundreds of different video file formats."
H.264 is by far the most common. I don't know of any video camera or DSLR that records to WebM or Theora.
"certain web browsers that you use to view video online only accept certain ‘codecs’ - or programs used to encode, transmit and playback video files - and others require plug-ins (converters) to integrate the video file with the browser."
"Certain web browsers"? Chrome and Firefox are the only ones that don't support H.264 natively. To view video on those browsers, it needs to be routed through a plug-in like Flash (standard on Chrome) or QuickTime. Browsers like Internet Explorer and Safari support the majority of all web video, right out of the box, no plug-ins needed. On mobile devices, the situation is even more obvious. Android is the only OS with support for WebM, and no mobile devices have hardware acceleration for WebM, draining your device's battery in no-time. However, all modern smartphones and tablets have support for H.264, most of them with hardware acceleration.
I'm all for an open source alternative to H.264. If it's at least as good and free to use, then I hope that it will become the standard; for the web, in desktop operating systems, for mobile devices, for video cameras and DSLRs. I'm just not convinced WebM is that alternative. It's unclear whether WebM is as good as H.264, and it's unclear whether it's free to use.
[+] [-] patrickaljord|15 years ago|reply
Chrome and Firefox are the browsers that supports html5 video with the biggest market share though.
[+] [-] kmfrk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glhaynes|15 years ago|reply
So just when most people started to finally standardize around one, we're going to introduce a new one that's already opposed by some of the most important players in the industry.
[+] [-] rtaycher|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrnkntl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emmett|15 years ago|reply
Think about it this way: if you have an average of 365 people uploading a video at any given time, you get 1 year of video per day. So YouTube probably has around 2,000 people uploading a video at any given time. (Compare to the number of channels on Justin.tv at any given time...)
[+] [-] mikeryan|15 years ago|reply
Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term - This line doesn't jive at all with my understanding of the VP8 codec. I thought implementations were left to devs, but the format was locked and didn't have room to be improved on? Either way the whole spec seems to be built around avoiding H.264 patent suite and "improving" on it is a minefield.
[+] [-] magicalist|15 years ago|reply
It's comparable in the sense that AAC and MP3 are comparable. VP8 can look excellent, it's just that high profile h264 can look better at the same bitrate.
It's also extremely likely that youtube uses h264 baseline profile anyway, since they serve to mobile devices (unless they secretly transcode and store multiple h264 versions for every video).
[+] [-] Scaevolus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kinetik|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aw3c2|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|15 years ago|reply
I think the big change is that they're now converting all uploads to WebM, previously they had to be above 720p OR uploaded in WebM to trigger this. Presumably because they've converted enough of the popular "classic" videos that they can now spare the encode time for all new files. Just another milestone on the journey towards having everything in WebM.
[+] [-] steve-howard|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpeebles|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antimatter15|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glhaynes|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uxp|15 years ago|reply
Really, that statement isn't any more worrisome than the unstated fact that Google could potentially delete every video on YouTube and every single email in Gmail and Google Apps on a whim.
[+] [-] smackfu|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simoun|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|15 years ago|reply