Group:Play Freedom/WebM recipe

How to upload a video to YouTube and ensure it is viewable in WebM

As of a couple weeks ago, you can now ensure that YouTube will make any video you upload available in WebMthrough their HTML5 interface, by uploading it as WebM and not using the "annotations" or "display ads" options. This guide will help you do that.

Unfortunately, viewers will still see your videos in Flash unless they have opted into YouTube's HTML5 beta. Instructions for opting in are at http://www.youtube.com/html5 -- be sure to point people there when promoting your videos.

Here we present instructions for using VLC version 1.1.2 to convert any common video format to WebM. VLC runs on GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS. We presume the same recipe will work on future VLC versions; please leave a note on the talk page here if you have any trouble. On GNU/Linux you can also do this job with Transmageddon, Arista, PiTiVi or FFMPEG.

Prerequisites:

• VLC 1.1.0 and greater
• A video to convert

Instructions

1. Open VLC.

2. Navigate to "Media" -> "Convert/Save..." or hit Ctrl+R.

3. In the "Open Media" window, click the "Add.." button.

4. Now simply navigate to the file(s) you want to convert, click (Ctrl+click to select more than one), and hit the "Open" button.

5. With the file(s) you selected in the "File Selection" field, click the "Convert/Save" button.

6. Then under "Destination", click browse.

7. From here, choose where the file should end up and name it something like example.webm.

• Option: You may select "Display the output" to play the video as it converts it, but that may slow things down significantly.

8. Next, click the "Profile" dropdown, to find and select the WebM option.

• If you are converting an interlaced video file, for example from a digital camcorder with a resolution like 1080i rather than 1080p, select "Deinterlace", otherwise ignore this.
• Option: Advanced options for quality and other settings are available if you click the button with the icon of tools to edit the selected profile.

9. Click start to begin transcoding, and you should see the media progress bar and the time in the lower-right corner indicate how far it is.

10. Once that has completed, open the resulting webm file to verify that it works.

Now you're all set to upload to YouTube (make sure not to use annotations, display ads, or use audioswap) and/or just enjoy!