By creating custom search boxes for all three browsers

Aug 10, 2010 11:13 GMT  ·  By

By now you’ve probably heard of WebM the new, open-source web video format. But if you’re still having trouble finding videos encoded with WebM or want to make them the default on YouTube in any browser that supports the format, the WebM blog has provided instructions for Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

Obviously, you will need to use a browser that supports the WebM for HTML5 videos. At this point, this means either Firefox 4 Beta, Chrome 6 (from the dev channel) or Chromium, and Opera 10.60 or higher. You’ll also have to be a part of the HTML5 Beta on YouTube.

With that out of the way, here’s how to create search shortcuts in all three browsers to ensure that the videos encoded with WebM will be surfaced.

“Since the WebM project launch, YouTube has been encoding videos uploaded at 720p or higher resolution in the WebM format. Today, the one million most popular videos of any size on YouTube are also available in the WebM format,” the WebM blog reads.

“All of the browsers that support WebM can create search shortcuts with custom parameters, however, so we've compiled instructions for making it very simple to search for WebM videos in YouTube,” the entry added.

You can check out the instructions in the blog post for all three browsers. Basically, it involves creating a custom search query for YouTube Search. When you’re done, any query done from the custom search bar will surface WebM-encoded videos.

Alternatively, if you want to check if one particular video is available in the WebM format, you could alter the URL manually. Simply add “&html5=True” (without the quotes) to the end of the URL. For example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz6gFokvOr0 would become http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz6gFokvOr0&html5=True .