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High-Quality YouTube Videos Coming Soon

Posted by Zonk on Fri Nov 16, 2007 04:02 PM
from the bit-more-like-teevee dept.
The Internet Media Television
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."
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Submission: High-quality YouTube videos coming soon by mlauzon (818714)
[+] Higher-Resolution YouTube Videos Currently In Testing 214 comments
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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  • 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 copyright issues. :(
    Though back on topic, it will be nice to watch something on there that is still watchable at full screen.
    • Though back on topic, it will be nice to watch something on there that is still watchable at full screen.

      Ya, until the tubes get clogged with all those High_Quality videos.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CSMatt (1175471)
      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 genuinely good from the beginning, it would still have sunk to its current low. A popular trend with Internet sites (and everything for that matter) seems to be a decline in their overall quality, purpose, philosophy, and performance as the site in question

    • In YouTube's defense, I've never heard of stage6 before. Rest assured, if it gets as popular as YouTube, they will get "crazy" on the copyright stuff. (Unless, of course, they're hosted out of country in some location where copyright stuff isn't an issue, but then, there are other issues to deal with at that point.)

      Also, the reason videos on YouTube are kind of crappy is because that's the resolution it's always supported. I mean, why upload a 100MB file at a decent native resolution if it's just going

  • SO how long (Score:5, Funny)

    by techpawn (969834) on Friday November 16 2007, @04:07PM (#21383771) Journal
    Till this is applied to all the YouTube Porn knock offs?

  • Just give us back Google Video (Score:4, Insightful)

    by wiredlogic (135348) on Friday November 16 2007, @04:10PM (#21383805)
    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.
    • I know it's not done by default, and it may be a bit annoying, but try clicking the button on the bottom-right of the video screen -- it makes the video full-screen.
    • BetaNews [betanews.com] say this is not high definition/HD.

  • Better encoding doesn't imply better videos... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tetsujin (103070) on Friday November 16 2007, @04:10PM (#21383807) Homepage Journal
    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?

  • To bad (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2007, @04:10PM (#21383809)
    To bad they are only talking about resolution.

  • Youtube Have Been Trailing for a long time (Score:3, Insightful)

    by illectro (697914) on Friday November 16 2007, @04:11PM (#21383811)
    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.
  • ...still in development.

  • Questions.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by PhantomHarlock (189617) on Friday November 16 2007, @04:11PM (#21383819)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by garcia (6573)
      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 taping...

      I don't care as much what the resolution is, but it would be nice to have those limits raised.
      • That would be nice as well. People upload longer videos anyway, they just split them up and it's real annoying to have to deal with that. I think they're trying to prevent lots of people uploading full length programs. Hollyweird probably likes that too since that makes it harder to upload full length TV shows. Not that I'd want to watch anything of value at such crap resolution, and honestly, for more than 10 minutes at a stretch. ;) But introduce higher quality, and I think longer format programs w
    • A lot of people are probably kicking themselves right now for not uploading them at a higher quality

      Why? What (little) I've uploaded, I encoded at 320x240 at the highest quality possible with their size restriction. I don't regret optimizing it for quality under a known set of limitations, just because of the possiblity that someday they might raise the limits a tad.


      lately I've been sending them high quality files so that when they are recompressed you're not adding crud on top of crud

      I had the i

    • I'm hoping for 1920 x 1200 progressive at 75 fps ... because my monitor can handle it :-)

      I guess that's not going to be 3 months away :-(

  • High quality youtube videos are already here! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Silverlancer (786390) on Friday November 16 2007, @04:13PM (#21383827)
    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.

  • In other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by moogied (1175879) on Friday November 16 2007, @04:13PM (#21383839)
    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

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

    That is all.

  • Reason for low res submissions (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Xzzy (111297) <sether AT tru7h DOT org> on Friday November 16 2007, @04:19PM (#21383915) Homepage
    "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.
    • Yea. They're only poor quality because people were only trying to surpass their current playback rate. If they had said before the original video was being stored, people would have run higher data rates and resolutions. Sigh.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Get_Plover (78671)
      i work for a content promotions company, gochongo [gochongo.com] ( all forms of content, not just video ), and we see a *lot* of video submissions at resolutions of 320x240 or below. every now and then someone will submit something NOT from their cell phone and one can really tell a qualitative difference. since cell phones and cams and the whole shebang are always improving youtube will have to improve their video quality if they don't want to become known ( even more ) as the source for low quality vids.
  • For the majority of videos that I watch, anyway, I'm not concerned about video quality (unless it's unbearably bad).

    YouTube started because people wanted to share their independently made videos. With the recent news of Opera/other high-profile media stars, more blingbling style stuff, etc... it seems YT is losing sight of what their community built them up to be.

  • I'd rather just have better sound. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Entropius (188861) on Friday November 16 2007, @04:30PM (#21384029)
    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.
      • There are a lot of classical or quasi-classical music videos on YouTube, and classical music listeners tend to be a fairly picky bunch.

  • Building for the future? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jacobcaz (91509) on Friday November 16 2007, @04:33PM (#21384055) Homepage
    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.
  • ...if this means they will be sending substantially more data. You know, we wouldn't want to hurt Comcast's poor, fragile, overworked network, would we, Snookums?

    Fascinating. Your ISP complaing necause you are USING the bandwidth they SOLD to you.

    Sorry, it's easy to rant about this, even if it is pointless. And I'm not even a Comcast customer. Guess I want my ISP (Cox) to avoid this in the future...
    • I hate Cox with all the passion my shriveled heart can muster. I moved cities, bought the same connection for the same price from Cox that I had from Comcast. Cos has easily half the speed or less.

  • Upscaling Video (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby (173196) on Friday November 16 2007, @04:52PM (#21384251) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • It also takes a crapload of processing power and is suiceptable to optical illusions which can actually make the quality worse. Basicly, trying to put back information that isn't there anymore is usually a lost cause, and most other restoration work rely on Mark I eyeballs to tweak the settings until the computer "gets it". Hardly anything worth doing on youtube content.
      • There's probably a subset of video that's popular enough to be worth upconverting.

        But Google already harnesses lots of distributed computing power: nearly all of the CPU cycles consumed in playing their videos is consumed on the viewing user's PC. Which uses a Google Flash applet to play it back. Google could include in that applet extra code which chews away at some of their archived video. Which could in turn become a way for Google to expand its crunching power to other tasks, like indexing. I'd toggle a
  • We use youtube for sharing clips of our son with friends and family (and anyone else who cares to see our corgi digging a hole on the beach and the my son falling in trying to "help").

    Using Adobe Premiere CS (or other tools) to pre-scale the videos to "youtube quality" gives us MUCH better results than uploading the original quality (which is 720x576p) and letting youtube resize it. It also (obviously) allows us to upload longer videos.

    The case of "not many high quality originals" is a chicken and egg issu

  • About a year or two I was attempting to upload HD quality video to GVideo and was severely disappointed with their compression quality. I had to re-export my videos at a lower quality, and those ended up being a little better (but still not great).

    The kicker was I had a 90 minute compilation of my videos that came up to several Gigs in the standard HD format, but around 500 MB in the lower quality export that I tried to send to Google. After several iterations through their upload software, I have never

  • 3 months? (Score:4, Funny)

    by bigdavex (155746) on Friday November 16 2007, @05:48PM (#21384837)

    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."
  • That's good but who is going to upload it? Most people are stuck with ADSL or cable that has good download speeds but crappy upload rates. Companies seem to think that in the Web 2.0 it is ok to sell access with 256kbps upstream. Ridiculous. TCP/IP is designed to work within synchronous (same down/upload) connections, so selling asynchronous connections makes absolutely no sense.

  • Err... No he didn't? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by johnnywheeze (792148) on Friday November 16 2007, @07:27PM (#21385735)
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

      by PhantomHarlock (189617) on Friday November 16 2007, @04:17PM (#21383881)
      Dial up was never, ever, ever designed for applications such as streaming media.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ackthpt (218170) *

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

        The internet in general is getting further away, like an expanding universe, from the capacity of dial-up. I've contemplated the point where DSL will begin to look like beaten down 56K due to the size of pages and volume of content.

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