YouTube finishes transcoding 80% of video catalog to WebM

Ever since Google announced its 'open source' WebM video format, they've been slowly but surely transcoding the entire YouTube video library. According to an update from John Luther, the Product Manager for WebM, while speaking at the Streaming Media West conference, as it stands now, 80% of all video available through YouTube is in the WebM format -- a significant amount of video indeed.

This is good news for proponents of the VP8 video codec and the WebM container, as the more content that's actually available in the format, the more support it's likely to get. On that front, most of the major browsers natively support WebM, with Opera 10, Chrome 6, and Firefox 4 all on board, while third-party codecs are available for use in both Safari and IE. Whether WebM and VP8 will remain free from patent suits, only time will tell -- but Google's certainly full steam ahead.

Tags: chrome, Firefox, google, IE, opensource, safari, video, webm, YouTube