Higher-Resolution YouTube Videos Currently In Testing

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."

H.264 on iPhone already

[MouseR]

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.

Technically..

[Junta]

Flash 9 supports h264 video codec.

Re:H.264 on iPhone already

[MostAwesomeDude]

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.

Re:To state the obvious

[bendodge]

According to some reports, yes, they have kept the originals.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[ZerdZerd]

I hope H.264 will be available in flash soon. Stage6 [stage6.com] had to close because of the expenses in delivering HQ videos, which is bad news.

Wow, like what they have been doing all this time?

[SmallFurryCreature]

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:iPhone quality?

[nevali]

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.

Re:iPhone quality?

[anotherone]

iPhone loads the higher quality .MP4 video because it can't play .flv - Apple TV probably does the same thing for the same reason.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[l-ascorbic]

It already is [adobe.com].

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[tknd]

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:iPhone quality?

[dtfinch]

&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.

Re:High Quality? I think Not.

[owlnation]

... actually there is high quality content Youtube -- the copyrighted stuff.

Eh? Maybe it's just me.

[Mesa MIke]

I couldn't see any difference in quality between the regular version and the "fmt=6" version of the skating dog.

Re:Technically..

[Skuld-Chan]

Oh? http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Astro [adobe.com]

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:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[araemo]

I suspect this is already taken care of.

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:Wow, like what they have been doing all this ti

[Chris Pimlott]

And those originals are still limited to something like 50 or 100 megs.

You are correct that videos uploaded directly via web browser are limited to 100 megabytes [youtube.com]. However, using the (Windows-only) multi-file uploader client allows videos of up to 1GB in size [youtube.com].

I certainly wish I had known about this before I spent a decent amount of time re-encoding motion jpegs to get them under 100MB.

Re:High Quality? I think Not.

[skeeto]

You must not be aware of it, but just about every video on YouTube is copyrighted.

Re:To state the obvious

[TubeSteak]

Looks like I found the answer:
http://www.youtube.com/t/terms [youtube.com]

6. Your User Submissions and Conduct

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.

Re:very low frame rate

[ben there...]

They probably use only the basic "blend" form of deinterlacing, rather than checking whether it is best to use IVTC for "Film" (typical DVD) or one of the fancier deinterlacing methods like TomsMoComp [doom9.org] for "NTSC" video (typical camcorder).

It's probably best to deinterlace video yourself prior to uploading to YouTube, if you care about quality.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[immcintosh]

It's a noticeable difference to me. Specifically, edges are substantially less noisy in the high quality version, whereas in the low quality version there are some pretty obvious compression artifacts around edges.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[HobophobE]

Perfume - Polyrhythm (Japanese music video): http://youtube.com/watch?v=qjL_FM23FzU&fmt=6 [youtube.com]

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.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[MikeXpop]

Thanks. Someone else linked to their own video of a DOOM hack demo here [youtube.com]. The quality is pretty bad but is horrendous without the parameter. I've also found a video of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals [youtube.com] here.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[Anonymous Coward]

Install this Greasemonkey script [userscripts.org]. You don't need Javascript at all to watch Youtube clips.

Mod parent "-1 whoosh"

[Dr. Evil]

d'oh

Re:Already Done Via Clever Users?

[pjoyce1]

The exploit used to upload these videos (changing the file header so the bitrate seemed to be less than 348kbps) was closed by YouTube a while ago. For normal accounts, YT re-encodes all uploaded video, even .flv below their target bitrate. I did a bunch of testing recently and blip.tv was the only major site that would not compress uploaded flash. The best bit for YT is to upload a large and high-quality original and make use of the &fmt=18 parameter to access the H.264 version. The audio and video improvements can be dramatic.

Re:High Quality? I think Not.

[jonasj]

Can you provide a link to a video on YouTube that is not copyrighted?

I can! http://uk.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4806B1FAAC9C7DE1 [youtube.com]

Confirmed! Specs, Screenshots and links galore!

[appleguru]

Cheers! Verified.. I downloaded the video files for each format from youtube.. they are as follows:

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 :-)

Re:Confirmed! Specs, Screenshots and links galore!

[appleguru]

There's also a fmt13 tag, that gives the following!

Format 13 tag:
176x144 @ 15fps
H.263 Video
AMR Narrowband Audio (8KHz, mono)
3gp container
700KB
http://g.appleguru.org/fmt13.3gp [appleguru.org]

Competition

[Monsieur_F]

Dailymotion announced HD support some weeks ago [dailymotion.com], so I guess Youtube wants to have that too.