It has been almost a year since Google announced its open-source WebM video format, and now the time is right for YouTube to begin transcoding videos into this new format.

Folks from YouTube are already working hard on converting of most popular videos on YouTube to WebM, and according to them, it seems that about 30 percent of all videos have been converted to this format. In addition, all new vides are now automatically converted into WebM, a video format that is based around VP8 codec that is intended for use with HTML5 video.

Of course, besides new videos, YouTube is working hard to convert all of the videos on YouTube to this format, and considering the number of videos on YouTube, this process could take a while.

According to YouTube, at busy upload times, new uploads will be converted, and during the less busy upload times, the system will partially focused on converting of old videos.

Google is quite determined to make WebM a leading video format on the web, will other online video sharing networks follow suit?

[via PC World]