http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bcb14/im_a_youtube_software_engineer_working_on_the/

<<Hi! I'm a web developer at YouTube. I work on the team that is responsible for the video player. I'm the "tech lead," but that doesn't mean I'm the most technically inclined on the team, it mostly means I have to answer a lot of emails and triage bug reports.

I've worked here for roughly 2.5 years (started soon after the Google acquisition). My primary focus is on the video player, which means working with primarily Actionscript, but also some Javascript, HTML and Python, so I may not be able to answer q's about YouTube's backend beyond general info.
We've noticed that reddit has had some issues with our UI lately ;) and wanted to give you all a chance to give us some feedback or ask questions about our processes. So ask away.>>

My post: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bcb14/im_a_youtube_software_engineer_working_on_the/c0m2wxk

Upvotes appreciated ^^

<< Q: Why are you guys using H.264 rather than an open video codec?

A: H.264 is supported by many browsers (all of them) with the help of the Flash Plugin, "open codecs" are not. When you want to build a video website that anyone can watch, you probably want to choose the former.

That said, Google recently finished an interesting acquisition, and had this to say about it:

   "Today video is an essential part of the web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the web platform," said Sundar Pichai, Vice President, Product Management, Google. >>