For those of you use webcams, either built into your computer or attached to your computer, to upload videos to YouTube, well, those days are coming to and end on January 16, 2016.
YouTube chooses not to support webcam uploads
YouTube has been the largest site for the viewing of videos on the Internet for some time and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. The Google property has been able to do this through change and innovation and now enjoys so many billion views each month it’s truly quite staggering in its scope.
But in order to stay number one, you need to change with the times and, let’s face it, the direct upload from a webcam is just kind of old school at the end of the day. Webcams have truly been replace or at least supplanted by the smartphone for some time and it’s awfully difficult to capture video walking down the street with a laptop with its camera turned away from you.
“This feature will be turned off because it is rarely used and is built on technology that is no longer supported,” the company said in announcing the upcoming change.
The technology, if you hadn’t already guessed is Adobe’s Flash. The first, and really the only necessary, nail in the coffin of Flash was hammered in by Apple’s refusal to support Flash with iOS and by consequence, iPhones and iPads.
YouTube loved Flash, but that was a long time ago. YouTube put the effective kibosh on Flash in January of this year in favor of Apple’s preferred HTML5 which, unlike Flash, supports the open VP9 codec which offers “higher quality video resolution with an average bandwidth reduction of 35 percent,” YouTube said in January.
Don’t worry you can still upload webcam video to YouTube
If you’re one of the dwindling number of people who will miss this feature, you need only take one more step to upload the same video. Webcam video will simply need to be saved elsewhere before being uploaded. For Mac users your best bet is Photo Booth while Windows users need only use Camera if running Windows 8+.
Android and iPhone users will still be able to upload video using the YouTube app for each.
