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."
By piggy backing on the networks of those poor, overworked ISP's that aren't getting paid by youtube. It's like youtube is stealing that bandwidth by exploiting this loophole.
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.
At imeem.com we added h264 support earlier in the year - we pretty much just changed the codec when, but our old video bitrate was already > 768kbit/sec so we had plenty of room to up the resolution and support DVD resolutions.
of course, to get DVD resolution videos to display you need to upload dvd resolution in the first place.
That guy was using a third party downloader, which doesn't account for the high quality video. He unknowingly downloaded the same video twice. While the regular youtube video is indeed 3.4 MB, the high quality one is 9.5 MB. Here's a picture showing the filesize [imageshack.us]
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.flv files were being loaded no matter what parameter I set. Does anyone have any examples of high quality videos besides the dog?
I've watched the linked-to video several times both with and without the fmt=6 parameter, and they both look identical to me. Same in terms of blurriness, artifacting, and resolution.
That's because you don't have oxygen-free monitor cables [google.com]. As a result, the bits going to your monitor don't have a warm waveform; They will instead be ragged and produce low quality output. Next time don't be such a cheapo and spring for the real quality components.
I'm not THAT interested in this quirk, just a little bit. =)
But I tried a few different things, viewing the video WITHOUT the &fmt=6 first:
- FF3 on XP - Same with/without the &fmt=6 - FF2 on XP - Same with/without the &fmt=6 - IE6 on XP - Same - FF3 on Mac 10.4 - Same with/without - Safari 3 on Mac - DIFFERENT with/without the &fmt=6 - Opera on Mac 10.4 - DIFFERENT with/without - Opera on XP - DIFFERENT with/without...So it looks to me like Firefox and IE users get the high-quality video by default, whereas Safari and Opera (and maybe other browsers) get the low-quality one? That's weird.
I use noscript, and instead of giving youtube permanent permissions, I always give it temporary permissions. Well, in recent weeks, I've needed to grant permissions to both youtube.com and ytimg.com to get videos to play, so they seem to be farming out their bandwidth to a caching service.
Bah, I threw out my Youtube ages ago and only watch television now. I also make a point of mentioning it at every possible opportunity on message boards.
I'd noticed that using the iPhone to view videos on WiFi, gave a notable better picture than the web version. I think the flag is accessing the same video the iPhone makes use of.
AppleTV also makes use of this higher level of quality I believe.
I think it's the resolution difference between the iphone, your tv and your computer monitor. On the iphone or your TV, the resolution is closer to that of youtube, so you don't notice the low quality, whereas on your monitor, they can devote 30 or 40 pixels to the aliasing on the low quality video. I noticed this effect a year and a half ago when watching youtube videos through a computer hooked to a tv - the video looked nearly perfect because of the resolution difference.
Just goes to show you that sometimes, lower quality is better.
It was widely reported (and by that I mean, Steve Jobs stood up on stage and announced it) that Google were storing all new videos as H.264 (and steadily converting old ones) for both the iPhone/iPod touch and Apple TV.
I would imagine this initiative is related to that.
I carefully compared screen and iPhone versions side by side with the same video, some northern lights over the north pole. Some stars in the sky and other details were clearly visible on the iPhone that were not apparent in the web version. The resolution in terms of number of pixels, I think is actually about the same. A lot of that could just come down to compression artifacts but I thought it was interesting there was a noticeable difference.
&fmt=18 gives you the h264 iphone video, also playable in the latest Flash 9.0 r115. &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.
At the moment the quality is ropey at times, you can say that it's no substitute for a real DVD (When there's a copyrighted file on the site, not that that's allowed).
Once it approaches DVD quality the lawyers will argue it's like DVD on demand.
iPhone users have been enjoying H.264-encoded YouTube for many months already.
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.
Apparently, recently, they've added the ability for video decoding to be hardware-accelerated, but only when the video is fullscreen. I'm still amazed that the vector graphics aren't accelerated, even if it's when Flash is a plugin -- at this rate, we'll have hardware-accelerated SVG in Firefox before we'll have properly hardware-accelerated Flash.
Now, when YouTube has the option to also serve the video in a straight mp4 container (or similar)...
Not only does FlashPlayer 10 have 2D/3D acceleration, but also supports gpu's. Search youtube for Flash Player Astro for videos of it in action - its pretty cool.
Youtube is free, and it's not worth $400 just for a little piece of black plastic that plays the same H.264 video that VLC and mplayer have had for years.
Also Apple's Quicktime MPEG4 library has some significant deficiencies; they don't implement the entire standard.
When Youtube upgrades the quality of their VIDEOS and not the quality of the video FILES... then I'll be interested. For now, as so many others have said... Youtube is adequate for watching 15 year olds set themselves on fire;)
Actually I would argue that there is plenty of worthwhile content on YouTube (and I'm not talking about unauthorized uploads of TV shows). The thing is that YouTube is like the Internet at large: there is lots of crap so if you just randomly poke around you will of course see a predominance of crap.
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.
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 must say, it looks nice for the most part. Though I would prefer my videos be higher resolution to begin with, not "converted" down then back up -- it would prevent those little slight things you see in the video.
High-resolution is great and wonderful, but what about the unwashed masses with older systems? I'd rather see a video play smoothly in medium resolution, rather than see it stutter in high resolution. The newer codecs seem to choke on older systems. My Mac can handle MPEG-2 without problems, but it has difficulty with some of the newer videos.
Now stage6 has gone, there's no site that provides decent quality streaming content. Youtube should get rid of the 10 min length cap and up their quality to fill the gap in the market.
Obviously, when I say market, I mean enormous money hole...
Obviously, when I say market, I mean enormous money hole...
At Google's next shareholder conference call:
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.
I was checking out anime OP/ED videos a while back for a series I had started watching and came across someone that has somehow tricked youtube into letting ultra-high resolution videos on the site.
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.
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.
C....by submitting User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license... The above licenses granted by you in User Videos terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your User Videos from the YouTube Service. You understand and agree, however, that YouTube may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of User Submissions that have been removed or deleted.
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.
How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Mod parent "-1 whoosh" (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:4, Insightful)
of course, to get DVD resolution videos to display you need to upload dvd resolution in the first place.
Parent
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
Parent
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:5, Informative)
Touhou 8 - Final Boss (Japanese video game): http://youtube.com/watch?v=UOWR1_uMdW8&fmt=6 [youtube.com]
CNN/Univision Debate: http://youtube.com/watch?v=_BGyWYtee18&fmt=6 [youtube.com]
These are the only ones I found (the skate dog shows up too) in a google search for site:youtube.com "fmt=6"
http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:youtube.com+%22fmt%3D6%22&num=100&hl=en&safe=off&filter=0 [google.com]
My guess at this point is they are reencoding the original uploads iff they are higher bitrate than the old codec youtube was using.
Parent
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:4, Interesting)
But I tried a few different things, viewing the video WITHOUT the &fmt=6 first:
- FF3 on XP - Same with/without the &fmt=6
- FF2 on XP - Same with/without the &fmt=6
- IE6 on XP - Same
- FF3 on Mac 10.4 - Same with/without
- Safari 3 on Mac - DIFFERENT with/without the &fmt=6
- Opera on Mac 10.4 - DIFFERENT with/without
- Opera on XP - DIFFERENT with/without
Parent
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:3, Informative)
I use noscript, and instead of giving youtube permanent permissions, I always give it temporary permissions. Well, in recent weeks, I've needed to grant permissions to both youtube.com and ytimg.com to get videos to play, so they seem to be farming out their bandwidth to a caching service.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
At the client end, as people have said... using H.264 means they can increase the resolution/quality with modest bandwidth increase.
At the server end... well, do you KNOW who owns YouTube now??
Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs (Score:5, Funny)
What
Parent
Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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)
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:iPhone quality? (Score:4, Informative)
I would imagine this initiative is related to that.
Parent
Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Parent
Confirmed! Specs, Screenshots and links galore! (Score:5, Informative)
Presumably anything that's available on the iphone will be available in fmt 18 and/or fmt 17. 18 looks good
Here's a screenshot that compares the formats: http://g.appleguru.org/youtubeformats.png [appleguru.org]
And here are download links and details on each of them
No format tag (standard):
320x240 @ 29.97 fps
Flash video (Sorenson h.263)
MP3 Audio (22.05KHz, mono)
FLV container
3.28MB
http://g.appleguru.org/nofmt.flv [appleguru.org]
Format 6 tag:
448x298 @ 29.98fps
Flash video (Sorenson h.263)
MP3 Audio (44.1KHz, mono)
FLV Conatiner
9.44MB
http://g.appleguru.org/fmt6.flv [appleguru.org]
Format 17 tag:
176x144 @ 12fps
MPEG-4 Video (simple profile)
MPEG-4 (AAC) audio (22.05KHz, mono)
3gp container
832KB
http://g.appleguru.org/fmt17.3gp [appleguru.org]
Format 18 tag:
480x320 @ 29.97fps
MPEG-4 Video (H.264)
MPEG-4 (AAC) audio (44.1KHz, STEREO!)
mp4 container
6.28MB
http://g.appleguru.org/fmt18.mp4 [appleguru.org]
Coolness
Parent
Re:Confirmed! Specs, Screenshots and links galore! (Score:4, Informative)
Format 13 tag:
176x144 @ 15fps
H.263 Video
AMR Narrowband Audio (8KHz, mono)
3gp container
700KB
http://g.appleguru.org/fmt13.3gp [appleguru.org]
Parent
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.
Technically.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently, recently, they've added the ability for video decoding to be hardware-accelerated, but only when the video is fullscreen. I'm still amazed that the vector graphics aren't accelerated, even if it's when Flash is a plugin -- at this rate, we'll have hardware-accelerated SVG in Firefox before we'll have properly hardware-accelerated Flash.
Now, when YouTube has the option to also serve the video in a straight mp4 container (or similar)...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not only does FlashPlayer 10 have 2D/3D acceleration, but also supports gpu's. Search youtube for Flash Player Astro for videos of it in action - its pretty cool.
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.
Parent
And Google video? (Score:4, Interesting)
High Quality? I think Not. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:High Quality? I think Not. (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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.
Parent
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...
Conversion (Score:3, Insightful)
CPU Loading (Score:3, Insightful)
I already mourn the loss of stage6 (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously, when I say market, I mean enormous money hole...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Parent
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.
Oh great... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:To state the obvious (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:To state the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
If I delete a video from YouTube, do they delete the source file?
Parent
Re:To state the obvious (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.youtube.com/t/terms [youtube.com]
6. Your User Submissions and Conduct
C.
Parent
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.
Parent