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Higher-Resolution YouTube Videos Currently In Testing
Posted by
Zonk
on Monday March 03, @01:10PM
from the someday-that-dog-shall-rule-the-world dept.
from the someday-that-dog-shall-rule-the-world dept.
jason writes "YouTube has never really been known for streaming videos at a high resolution, but it appears that they are taking early steps at providing higher quality videos. The project was announced last year by the site's co-founder Steve Chen, and now appears to be in the earliest stages of deployment. By adding a parameter onto the end of a video's URL you're able to watch it in a higher quality (in terms of audio and video) that is actually quite noticeable. Not all videos have been converted at this point, but they do have millions upon millions of videos that they need to do."
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High-Quality YouTube Videos Coming Soon 134 comments
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."
Firehose:Higher-Resolution YouTube Videos Being Tested by Anonymous Coward
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How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:5, Informative)
Some guy in the comments on the blog downloaded both formats and they came out in exactly the same size. People here are also commenting that they only changed to support H.264. This means that they do not have higher bandwidth needs, but higher processing needs due to a smarter codec (H.264).
Personally I've played around with x264 and the improvements in quality are pretty impressive with enough encoding time and the right encoding parameters thrown at the encoding process.
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:5, Insightful)
One other interesting thing is that I haven't been able to find another high-quality video on youtube. I tried the &fmt=6 parameter on several videos, both popular and new. Two of these videos (a Fall Out Boy video [youtube.com] and an NBA recap [youtube.com]) loaded with the parameter, but didn't look any better. A quick check showed that the same
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:5, Funny)
What
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:5, Informative)
Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
Converting (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? I would argue that of the millions of videos on the net that I think need to be at a higher quality, very few of them are on YouTube.
Re:Converting (Score:5, Funny)
iPhone quality? (Score:5, Interesting)
AppleTV also makes use of this higher level of quality I believe.
Re:iPhone quality? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just goes to show you that sometimes, lower quality is better.
Re:iPhone quality? (Score:5, Informative)
&fmt=6 gives you the comparable quality but higher bitrate Flash video which works on older Flash players.
And &fmt=17 gives you a crappy low bitrate very low resolution mpeg4 video for older/cheaper phones, but it isn't playable in Flash.
Lawyers will love this (Score:5, Interesting)
Once it approaches DVD quality the lawyers will argue it's like DVD on demand.
H.264 on iPhone already (Score:5, Informative)
To be frank, I've not been on YouTube.com ever since I've gotten the iPhone. The video quality is SO much better on H.264 than crap^H^H^H^H flash players that it's worth wasting time with it. Plus, you can actually pause, fast-forward, rewind and skip to any point without it failing like flash players always do.
Re:H.264 on iPhone already (Score:5, Informative)
Also Apple's Quicktime MPEG4 library has some significant deficiencies; they don't implement the entire standard.
Same great pixels, more bits please (Score:5, Interesting)
YouTube has never really been known for streaming videos at a high resolution,
The problem isn't necessarily resolution- it's the unbelievably low bitrates, and the fact that they insist on re-encoding everything that's uploaded to them. It's apparently possible to upload FLV in a very precise way such that they don't re-encode, but they could make it a lot easier (and it's to their advantage- every video given to them ready-to-go is a video they don't have to waste incoming bandwidth, temporary disk storage, and bandwidth on.)
What youtube *should* be doing is offering paid accounts which allow for higher bitrate videos; say, a low-end for the camwhores who want better pixels for their whining, a mid-level for guys like Will It Blend, and a top-end account for big companies that want to push their ads out on Youtube. Will It Blend, for example, would probably plunk down $20/month to get better videos.
Sadly, though- companies like blip.tv have already filled the niche of high-quality videos, and they're getting attacked left and right by other sites like metafilter which already does revenue sharing...and there are a billion and one embedded FLV hosting sites...
I already mourn the loss of stage6 (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously, when I say market, I mean enormous money hole...
Re:I already mourn the loss of stage6 (Score:5, Funny)
Google: Good news! By increasing video quality and duration we've managed to double YouTube's profits over the last quarter.
Investor: Wait, didn't YouTube have negative profits last quarter?
Google: Ah yes, that would be the bad news.
Already Done Via Clever Users? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's an example: http://youtube.com/watch?v=2Vtrmpol390 [youtube.com]
Notice that the "clock" on the player says its 9:59 long. Note that the streaming hiccups and stutters because the actual video is only 1:30 long -- just like any other anime OP. The time-code computation appears to be totally off for this video, but the quality is fantastic. Listen with good headphones -- the audio and video quality are both fantastic in this video.
Now compare to a "normal" youtube version: http://youtube.com/watch?v=B5PoF34qM0o [youtube.com]
This person's other movies are all other anime OP/ED sections that all say they are around 10 minutes long, but in reality are all 1:30 or so.
So it seems this person has figured out how to exploit something in youtubes video analysis/recoder to get ultra-high quality audio/video, at the expense of breaking the media-length calculations.
Wow, like what they have been doing all this time? (Score:5, Informative)
What do you think they are converting you lamebrain? They kept the originals, so no upsampling needed (doesn't really work anyway), they just RE-encode the original.
Re:To state the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
If I delete a video from YouTube, do they delete the source file?
Re:To state the obvious (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/t/terms [youtube.com]
6. Your User Submissions and Conduct
C.
Re:High Quality? I think Not. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you browse YouTube a bit, and subscribe to the channels that are actually worthwhile, you will quickly build up a feed of interesting stuff with new videos every day. You can use featured videos to get some ideas of new channels to consider. On the other hand, using "most viewed" and "currently watching" to find good stuff is a waste of time. As a random example of something "worthwhile" (in my opinion), consider Wallstrip [youtube.com]--a show that does profiles on companies and stock trends, and is infused with sarcasm and wit. There are also channels that discuss science, that do decent original comedy, there is a national geographic channel, etc.
Frankly I think YouTube is dropping the ball a bit by not providing a more useful method of finding the best content. An Amazon-like "people who subscribe/rate like you also like..." would help alot. Just as Slashdot uses various tricks (moderation, friends/foes, etc.) to bring attention to the quality material, YouTube should work harder to bring the good material to the top. The current star-ratings, comment-ratings, and ranking-by-viewing are not working very well. Frankly I don't care about the ratings of YouTube at large; I care about the ratings of a finite subset of like-minded users.