>The constant churn of new video formats is one possible reason. If YouTube doesn’t convert all their old videos, they may become effectively unplayable
YouTube already does an encoding pass even with the most "perfect" h264 source. I wouldn't worry about video formats more than I'd worry about when YouTube shuts down.
We're going to need an incredible increase in storage density before we can think of doing a full replica of YouTube (I wonder if we'll ever have the processing power to de-dupe the amount that's uploaded).
YouTube already does an encoding pass even with the most "perfect" h264 source. I wouldn't worry about video formats more than I'd worry about when YouTube shuts down.
We're going to need an incredible increase in storage density before we can think of doing a full replica of YouTube (I wonder if we'll ever have the processing power to de-dupe the amount that's uploaded).