"So, does YouTube have someone sit there and manually check every video to see if quality would be a little better if the bitrate was tweaked" Of course they d

"So, does YouTube have someone sit there and manually check every video to see if quality would be a little better if the bitrate was tweaked" Of course they don't and no one expects them too. Have you seen the videos on youtube? The quality is wildly variable, with the mean-quality being shit. For many other content — music vids, doccos, tv-shows, movies — quality is important. "If you publish several hundred videos on your own and you've carefully tweaked and created an encoding profile for each one and you want to use the same care when transitioning to WebM, then I recognize that that will be pretty time-consuming for you. " Which is precisely why so many people aren't interested in WebM. "However, I sincerely doubt that's a very common case," You’re making assumptions. It may be very few people or it may be a lot. How confident are you when you say it's not very common? How did you come to this conclusion?