Remember Google’s strive to have WebM support replacing Flash and H.264? Well, the search engine giant has now taken a huge step to push the support for WebM video streaming by having YouTube running on WebM. Yes, YouTube belongs to Google if you’ve forgotten. From now on, all videos uploaded to YouTube will be automatically transcoded into a WebM version.

YouTube said that nearly a third of YouTube’s archives have already made the transition to the open source format, though if you think that’s a small proportion, you should probably know that those 30 percent account for 99 percent of all views on the site. Apparently, we all have a narrower set of interests than we like to believe.

So, with all popular vids encoded and every incoming one getting the transcoding treatment, all you really need now is a compatible browser — Chrome (naturally), Firefox 4, Opera, or IE9 with a plug-in — and to enroll in YouTube’s HTML5 trial linked below to get rolling with WebM playback. Appending “&webm=1″ to a search string or a video’s URL will also help you ensure you’re getting onboard the WebM format, though it doesn’t seem to work for me. Well, that’s only me maybe.

SOURCE via YouTube