An update to the YouTube embed code which uses <iframe> allows your blog readers to view the video in whatever they have set in their YouTube preferences. This means that if they chose to view the videos in HTML5, embedding the videos on your blog / website using the new embed code will show up for them in HTML5 - just as if they were watching the video directly on the YouTube website.

Now that YouTube supports WebM (actually, since it supports HTML5), it's easier than ever to download the videos - all you have to do is look at the page source (remember to enable HTML5 for YouTube first) and search for "videoPlayer.setAvailableFormat": you should see some links and next to it, the video quality is displayed, like so:

WebM is a new open source project suppored by Google, Mozilla, Opera and many others which uses the VP8 video codec Google aquired from On2 as well as Vorbis audio for HTML5 videos (HTML5 uses a built-in codec so you don't need Adobe Flash for viewing videos from YouTube for instance - which results in a very low processor usage compared to Flash and so on).

Firefox 3.7 (soon to be 4.0) got WebM support yesterday. The Ubuntu Mozilla Daily PPA for Ubuntu got this new builds so you can finally install Firefox with WebM support in Ubuntu - for 32bit only for now.

Besides WebM, Firefox 3.7 (4.0) from the Mozilla Daily PPA also features the new extension manager:



Please note that Firefox 3.7 is unstable so expect to find bugs! Also, this PPA will update your Firefox 3.6 to the nightly. If you don't want this, after installing Firefox 3.7, remove the PPA!

Epiphany web browser is probably the only browser which doesn't need an update to be able to display WebM videos.

You do need however an updated Gstreamer which Ubuntu users can install from the Gstreamer devs PPA:

YouTube, Dailymotion and other websites already allow you to view HTML5 videos, but they don't come with a full-screen button.

For Google Chrome / Chromium, there's an extension which easily fixes this by adding a button where the old full-screen button used to be on YouTube:

(full-screen button added in the bottom right corner)

Both Firefox and Opera already released WebM (VP8) capable nightly builds which you can download from here:

To run Opera in Ubuntu, download the archive, extract it and double click the "opera" file. Then try out this video which already uses WebM (with VP8) - but don't forget to enable HTML5 for YouTube before watching the video.

Ubuntu users: if you want a WebM capable Chromium, add the Chromium daily PPA - the latest builds (as of 20 May) already have WebM support. Install it with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/ppa && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra

"chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra" is required by WebM it seems.

Note: Google Chrome (not Chromium) will be getting WebM support starting with May 24.