• PC World, Wednesday, April 20, 2011 12:24 PM

Continuing the push for Google's WebM video format, YouTube now says the majority of its most-viewed videos are available in the open-source, royalty-free format -- or about 30% of all videos hosted by the site. "Backed by Google, Mozilla, and Opera, to name a few, WebM is a competitor of the H.264 format, backed by Apple and predominantly used for mobile video because of the lack of Flash support on iOS devices," PCWorld explains. All new videos uploaded to YouTube are now automatically transcoded into Web.

Bigger picture, "Google has been pushing for its competing video format this year," writes PCWorld. "The company announced in January that Google Chrome would drop support for the Apple-backed H.264 format." Google also released a WebM video plugin for Internet Explorer 9 from Microsoft, in an effort to bring the codec to a previously unsupported browser. Besides new videos, YouTube is also working to transcode its entire video catalog to WebM, confirmed James Zern, a software engineer at YouTube, in a blog post.

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