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June 1, 2007
YouTube to Re-Encode Videos to Support AppleTV and iPhone
I've had a love-hate relationship with Flash video for a long time. Yes, it's the dominant video format on the Net, largely thanks to YouTube, and it certainly downloads quickly. But the quality of Flash video often leaves something left to be desired, particularly compared with the crisp, clean resolution of MPEG-4 H.264, which I and many other video bloggers use for our own vlogs. Plus, H.264 is a cinch on Macs, which makes sense, because it's the preferred format of Apple's AppleTV technology.
So perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that Apple's Steve Jobs has worked out a deal with YouTube to re-encode their entire catalogue of video into H.264 so it'll run on both AppleTV and the new iPhone.
First word of the news broke via iLounge:
... the YouTube update will take place in stages, beginning with the free software update for Apple TV owners in mid-June. At launch, "thousands of videos designed for Apple TV" will be available, with additional thousands added weekly until the entire YouTube library becomes accessible to Apple TV users this fall. When asked what "designed for Apple TV" meant, Moody said that YouTube will soon be encoding videos in the H.264 streaming-efficient compression format preferred by Apple TV, and that all new videos submitted to YouTube as of the mid-June launch of the AppleTV update will be playable by the device. From then until fall, YouTube will be encoding its entire back-catalog in H.264 format, adding videos in chunks until everything is accessible to Apple TV users. Direct links and the on-screen keyboard-based search engine mentioned in our previous update will bring you to current and old videos alike.
What I'm wondering, though, is if YouTube keeps an archive of all those videos that have been submitted to them in H.264 in the first place. If so, that'd be great, because those videos won't have to be re-encoded - and will thus look at lot better on the Apple devices. The other big question is whether AppleTV or the iPhone will bother to support Flash at all, now that they've bagged the biggest gorilla in the user-generated video market. Don't be surprised if lots of other video sites follow YouTube's lead and offer H.264. This doesn't mean Flash is in trouble by any means, of course, since almost every PC on the Internet can display Flash video, which can't be said by any other format at the moment.
But the big winner here is all of us who like to have a choice in video formats. Cross-compatability is always a good thing. Let's just hope it's DRM-free and we'll be good to go. -andy
Tags: Apple | AppleTV | formats | Google | H.264 | iPhone | MPEG-4 | transcoding | video | YouTube
Posted by acarvin at June 1, 2007 11:12 AM
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