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."

Converting

[RandoX]

they do have millions upon millions of videos that they need to do.

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.

Quality problem

[sunderland56]

Note to YouTube: forcing your users to upload a crappy resolution compressed/downsized video, and then upsampling it to a higher resolution, does NOT produce a high-quality video. How about allowing people to upload decent quality videos in the first place??

High Quality? I think Not.

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

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 ;)

Conversion

[Tavor]

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.

Re:Technically..

[SanityInAnarchy]

Knowing Flash, it may or may not be worth it.

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)...

CPU Loading

[Detritus]

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.

Re:High Quality? I think Not.

[JustinOpinion]

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.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[szyzyg]

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.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[Dahamma]

Are you talking at the server end or client end?

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:I already mourn the loss of stage6

[digitalhermit]

Yup. Same here.

Funny thing is that I would gladly pay $40/month for a site like Stage6. I pay around $60/month currently for cable television but rarely watch it because the shows I like are inconvenient to watch. Yeah, there's MythTV and Tivo, but there's rarely a time when I'll sit down and plan what I'm going to watch. I'd much rather browse and get that instant gratification. It would be great if the producers of these shows could come to some advertising/subscription agreement. I have looked at iTunes, but the selection there was dismal.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[MikeXpop]

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?

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[jericho4.0]

"Piggy backing"? Your ISP probably hasn't provided much content lately, have they?

Stone age sound

[DF5JT]

[Examples of HQ youtube video]

And still monaural sound.

I don't get it. What is it that made people accept this abysmal stone age technique? We have two ears, they give sound a spacial dimension and there is nothing better enhancing the video experience than giving it a great sound.

Monaural. How ultra retro - AM broadcast quality of the 60s.

Painful for those with ears, alas.

Re:Stone age sound

[MikeXpop]

It's not really important how many are mono/stereo, but how many should be mono/stereo. I imagine there is a large number of videos that, through some program or another, ended up doubling the mono track on both channels. Even those videos that were recorded in stereo, most either have the effect lost through microphone positioning or just through the subject matter itself (If someone filmed a speech at a rally, for example).

The bottom line for Youtube is that keeping monaural sound is an easy way to cut the audio size of videos in half with results that only 5-10% of users will notice/care about.