In the promotional material released for the updated AppleTV, which now plays Youtube videos, it was mentioned that Youtube would be switching from their Flash-based video encoding to H.264 for new video starting June 1, and all their current videos would be reencoded. There is very little (nothing, actually) on Youtube's site about this.

This brings up several interesting questions:

1) Could Youtube start carrying widescreen videos for clips shot with HDV cameras?

2) Has Youtube actually kept all the thousands of gigabytes of original video uploaded to their servers so they can properly reencode to H.264?

3) If they give us the specs for the final product, can we upload video already encoded to H.264, saving their encoding time and insuring that our video remains unmolested?

4) Why didn't I think of any of this? ;)

"According to Apple VP David Moody, the reason for this delay is that all current YouTube content will need to be transcoded to Apple's preferred video standard, H.264. All content uploaded in June, however, will be automatically encoded into H.264, so additional transcoding will not be necessary for any of these newer files."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube

That is such good news! Yet I find it hard to believe they won't do any transcoding. What if your video is too long (300MB)?

I guess if it's too long, they won't "transcode" per se, they'll just "recompress" using the same codec. Transcoding is the act of converting digital content from one format to another. They'll be keeping it in the same format.

You're right, I used the wrong term, however the result is the same: a drop in quality.

The best option would be to specify what do they exactly want (size, length, bitrate for both video and audio), so we can upload in that format. This would give us full control over "the look".