The following message is being viewed when watching videos:

"We are currently performing site maintenance. Be cool – we'll be back 100% in a bit."

Can see it too, but videos seem to work normal...

I've just spotted that with some videos you can click anyway on the video "trackbar" now and the player will start buffering from that point (like on Google Video).

Example of it working:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0zbjCkSt3U

I couldn't replicate this on all videos.

This was mentioned in a youtube blog post a while ago. Something about "moving to google format."

Link to the blog posting is here introducing new features:
http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=zxZI8zcQr-Y

James, was that the post you were talking about? I don't see them mention a "google format" anywhere in there

Im not sure it was "format" but it was something like that. I saw it in the "Googles Blogs" section but i cant find it now. If only i could remember the right phrase... I think i made a thread about it but nobody responded

Yeah, I noticed that a while back as well. Whenever you click on that "trackbar", the player will grab a new video from the server with a "start" parameter like this:
cache.googlevideo.com/get_video?video_id=[VIDEO ID]&start=250641

which is similar to what GVideo's been doing, with a "begin" parameter,
http://vp.video.google.com/videodownload?version=0&secureurl=[...]
&begin=92515&len=58518&docid=9175699262769547045

I think one unit for the YouTube videos is about 50ms.

#James you can see all of your previous poasts here http://blogoscoped.com/forum/posts-by-James+Xuan.html and i still don't see anything like that

That only goes back 1 month for me. im pretty sure its been more that that

Excellent!