Anyone else frustrated in lack of WebM content and WebM quality on YouTube?
I was watching a lot of E3 stuff this year on YouTube and noticed that there seem to be less and less WebM encoded streams in favor of H.264 as time goes on. Even if they do offer the WebM stream, they seem to be maxed out at 360p or 480p while H.264 gets 720p, 1080p, and 4k.
The latest Chrome and Firefox support both the VP9 and Opus codecs in the WebM container, but they are rarely used. I have a Greasemonkey script to download files and even though WebM is an option to download, the HTML5 player keeps trying to serve me H.264 or bug for the Flash plugin.
Has anyone else noticed this? WebM was already a second class citizen on YouTube (and the web in general), but the situation seems to worsen as time goes on. Is Google giving up?
> Has anyone else noticed this?
Nope, quite the opposite.
> WebM was already a second class citizen on YouTube (and the web in general), > but the situation seems to worsen as time goes on.
We must be looking at different webs.
> Is Google giving up?
Hardly.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/01/03/2349203/youtube-goes-4k-and-vp9-at-ces
"These hardware vendors include major names like ARM, Broadcom, Intel, LG, Marvell, MediaTek, Nvidia, Panasonic, Philips, Qualcomm, RealTek, Samsung, Sigma, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba."
And then there's the upcoming Daala, targeting a generation beyond HEVC and VP9: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo1.shtml
So things are looking pretty good in the free codec world.
Since latest versions of Firefox/Abrowser support the H.264 codec via gstreamer, YouTube seems to put a preference on that over WebM by default. Like the one guy said, 1080p content is pretty much only for H.264 and many times I am stuck with 480p WebM files if I choose.
I'm glad that more companies are getting behind VP9/Opus in the WebM container or by themselves.
I am a translator!
t3g, 720P or higher WebM videos are no longer provided by YouTube when using youtube-dl or ViewTube (I have no idea whether they can be accessed using other methods). For music videos, you can usually get much better quality versions (unfortunately in H.264 format only but you can transcode to get much higher quality WebM videos) from the vevo.com website (youtube-dl can download from it - you might need to use a VPN for it) or the MTV websites (you just need to use the video code numbers and copy them to a website such as the two below and then use rtmpdump - a VPN might also be needed to access some videos).
Here are two sites that provides rtmp links for MTV websites:
http://www.mtv.com/player/includes/mediaGen.jhtml?vid=****
http://intl.esperanto.mtvi.com/www/xml/media/mediaGen.jhtml?uri=mgid:uma:video:mtv.co.uk:****
Just replace the stars by the video code number, e.g. for this video
http://www.mtv.com.au/music/artists/florence-and-the-machine/videos/shake-it-out-698321/?playlist=florence-and-the-machine-playlist
the video code number is 698321.