High-Quality YouTube Videos Coming Soon

mlauzon writes with the news that YouTube's co-founder Steve Chen has announced high-quality video streams are in the works for the popular site. He spoke today at the NewTeeVee Live event, discussing the challenges facing the project and when we can expect to see less grainy social videos. "The need to buffer the video before it starts playing will change the experience. Hence the experiment, rather than just a rapid rollout of this technology. On stage, he said the current resolution of YouTube videos has been "good enough" for the site until now. Chen told me he expects that high-quality YouTube videos will be available to everyone within three months. Chen also confirmed that in YouTube's internal archive, all video is stored at the native resolution in which it was sent. However, he said, a large portion of YouTube videos are pretty poor quality to begin with — 320x240. Streaming them in high-quality mode isn't going to help much."

Its about time..

I mean honestly, stage6 has been doing this for a while. Not to mention on stage6 there is no size requirements, plus they are not so crazy on the copyright stuff.
IMO youtube has gone downhill a bit. Seems like more often than not, a link is dead for copyr

Re:

YouTube was terrible from the very beginning. The only reason anyone puts up with the site is because it is so popular, and the only reason that it is popular is because of the media coverage of the Lazy Sunday removal. Of course, even if YouTube was gen

SO how long

Till this is applied to all the YouTube Porn knock offs?

Just give us back Google Video

We really don't need HD quality streaming video. The biggest annoyance is that YouTube particuarly sucks for people running at high resolutions like 1600x1200. We can deal with the artifacts from scaled up video. Just give us the bigger window as used by Google Video for all of YouTube. It's really annoying that most of the Google Video search only goes to YouTube nowadays.

Better encoding doesn't imply better videos...

No matter how good the encoding is, most of what you'll see on Youtube will never be "high quality video"...

I mean, how many inane video blog rants does the world need? How many crappy video editor projects capitalizing on some weak meme, repeating the gag (with/without stutter, slow-mo, upside-down, etc.) until it has lost any hope of being at all funny? And how many poorly-produced copycats for any given video on the site?

Re:

More access rarely results in more, better videos. Like anything else, a few good ones rise to the top. Fortunately, we don't have to watch the crappy ones.

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YouTube is going to dissolve copyright?

To bad

To bad they are only talking about resolution.

Youtube Have Been Trailing for a long time

The fact that they were so big meant people still used them even though every other site offered better quality. And the people running other sites had to deal with the fact that the content partners that understood youtube would ship them youtube quality videos, regardless of the site in question. now if only youtube would let you upload mp3's directly like imeem.com [imeem.com] they might get me insterested.

High quality video content...

...still in development.

Questions....

The big question is, will you need to pay to share your videos at higher quality, or will that be free? Also, are they talking about a higher resolution and higher data rate, or just higher data rate? It would be nice to move up to 400X300 or 640X480, but that seems unlikely. At least they can do away with the artifical scaling they're doing now on playback, which is really horrible.

Currently, the only good outlet I've found for high quality video sharing is vuze.com. I currently upload videos to both YouTube and Vuze, since with Vuze you have to install the torrent client, etc. The upside is full HD videos.

I find it very interesting to note that the videos you upload are stored in the original format. A lot of people are probably kicking themselves right now for not uploading them at a higher quality, although lately I've been sending them high quality files so that when they are recompressed you're not adding crud on top of crud. However I've never sent them anything higher resolution than 320X240. Might have to re-up some stuff if they decide to kick the resolution higher than that.

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The big question for me is whether or not they will raise the video length limit for standard uploads. I take plenty of my own video and put it on YouTube but I have to constantly remember the small file size (100MB) and video length (10 minutes) when I'm

High quality youtube videos are already here!

See this link [videohelp.com] for a guide, and any of my recent uploads [youtube.com] for an example. For a really extreme example that demonstrates how terribly inefficient the Flash H.263 decoder is, see this 720p 8megabit clip of Transformers [youtube.com]. Its quite possible already.

Of course, on a serious note, I welcome the ability to upload high quality videos without relying on absurdly high bitrates to compensate for H.263's crappiness.

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Yes, that tutorial makes we want to do that for every single video I upload. :) I had heard that was possible, but holy moly.

In other news

The internet was found dead in its apartment today. Appearently from a broken back. A short statured man was found near the crime scene trying to limp home. Upon being arrested by ICANN the man was heard screaming "but YOU TUBE! YOU TUBE! I KNOW YOU TUBE!"

It is survived by ARPANET, and SneakerNET. As well as PigeonNET

Proviso

"High-Quality Video" refers only to the medium, not the content.

That is all.

Reason for low res submissions

"However, he said, a large portion of YouTube videos are pretty poor quality to begin with -- 320x240. Streaming them in high-quality mode isn't going to help much"

I would think a lot of this has to do with the fact that it's a pretty common trick to get decent quality with the existing youtube.. resize your video to 320x240 at the highest bitrate that will keep you below 100 megs. The logic is if you reduce the amount of reprocessing that's necessary, fewer artifacts appear.

I'd rather just have better sound.

Higher sound quality wouldn't be that hard to implement: Vorbis can get very near transparency at 80 kbps, and 60 kbps Vorbis isn't bad.

For people who watch music-type stuff on Youtube and care about things sounding nice, a better audio stream would be a welcome change.

Building for the future?

I was going to make a crack - like everyone else - about how there is still not "high quality" video (content) on YouTube. But then I thought, if the technology is put in place someone will eventually fill the void.

I was really into video production back in the mid 90s. At that time I was all VHS and used a Video Toaster - I thought it was hot shit, but there was so much I couldn't do like frame-accurate editing, 3D animation, etc.

In about 1996 I participated in a consumer survey on video products. They group I was with kept looking at me funny because I wanted frame-accurate control, higher-quality, not affected by copying (multiple generations) all in consumer equipment. Even I thought it was a pipe-dream - that kind of control was WAAAAY out of the hands of a hobbyist.

But when I finally got my hands on my first MiniDV camera, hooked to my computer via Firewire, it was that huge leap forward that I would have NEVER dreamed about in 1996. All of a sudden I had a medium that was frame-accurate, didn't suffer from multiple generations, and was much higher quality than VHS, allowed frame-level edits/graphic control. How cool!

Now there are even movies out shot on MiniDV and it's variants. That would have been impossible to do with anywhere near the same level of quality - on consumer (!) equipment - in the mid-90s.

Once the technology is in place, content will eventually be created to fill the void. We just have to give it more time.

Upscaling Video

Video can be upscaled to higher resolution much better than can photos, because video has more info in it. When a feature smaller than a sampled pixel moves across several pixels, it doesn't affect the all pixels the same way. The sampling grid can be "deconvolved" (or otherwise factored out) to a great extent, relying on the relative consistency of objects' appearance across brief intervals and short distances.

Google's got the money and PhDs to make that work. I'd love to see them drag the archive of lorez movies into a hirez platform.

3 months?

Chen told me he expects that high-quality YouTube videos will be available to everyone within three months.

I think after about 2 months I'd say, "Screw it, I'm sick of staring at this 'buffering' animation."

Err... No he didn't?

I was at that conference, and while the question about high-quality video was asked, Chen pretty much said they were happy with the quality of online video they had, and were much more focused on the reach of YouTube, keeping the files small so that everyone could watch them, even those without a lot of bandwidth and in other countries.
He certainly didn't say anything about a high quality YouTube in the next three months. I think this blogger read more into the talk than what Chen said. However he implies that he talked to him directly, so I can only vouch for what was said at the conference.

Re:Scratch me

Dial up was never, ever, ever designed for applications such as streaming media.

Re:File size - 1GB now

It is 1Gb now if you use YouTube Uploader: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=55743&topic=10527 [google.com]

Re:File size - 1GB now

Perl You Tube Uploader [catonmat.net]

I absolutely love this script. I even wrote a wrapper for it which has my password and login and uses the file name as the description, etc.

If I have a ton of videos I need to upload, right before I go to bed I just do a youtube_batch *.mp4. When I wake up everything is online.

Direct link to perl script [catonmat.net]