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High-Quality YouTube Videos Coming Soon
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."
Last time I tried to upload a video, the max size was 100MB. They had better increase that if they want people to upload high resolution videos.
Fascism is the greatest political ideology ever conceived. Sorry.
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.
Till this is applied to all the YouTube Porn knock offs?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
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 am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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?
Bow-ties are cool.
To bad they are only talking about resolution.
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 they might get me insterested.
...still in development.
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.
See this link for a guide, and any of my recent uploads 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. 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.
It is survived by ARPANET, and SneakerNET. As well as PigeonNET
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
That is all.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
On a dial-up I can barely download youtube at the moment. With higher res my puny bandwidth will be insufficient. As is most of this stuff is binary and doesn't compress.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I get tired of ripping all those low-quality streams, I hope the ripping tools will cope with the HD stuff!
And of course the dissolving of copyright will improve the quality. Right?
"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.
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.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
It is 1Gb now if you use YouTube Uploader: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=55743&topic=10527
appleguru.org
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.
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.
So when are we non-iPhone owners going to get access to the h.264 streams?
...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...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
So what's the procedure for uploading now? I remember it used to be something along the lines of... 1.) Upload your video. 2.) Wait 30 minutes for a person to record your video to VHS, piss on it, drop kick it, reassemble it and reupload it. 3.) ...
4.) Profit?
But seriously, I can't stand the unsightly quality of YouTube videos. Most of my friends just kinda tilt their heads, but whenever I need to watch a fan-made (good quality) music video, Stage6 or direct download of the original AVI are the only options.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
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.
--
make install -not war
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 issue, not a "people don't have high quality video" issue. EVERYONE resizes before uploading, because there was no reason not to!
...hi-res Leave Britney Spears Alone!
Oh, mean the resolution, not the content.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I've always wished youtube would enable video smoothing during playback to help cancel out some of the pixelation. Its as simple as setting smoothing = true on the flash video display object, yet it makes a world of diferenece in terms of quality. The videos are also small enough that it wouldn't be a big hit on cpus. AS1/2: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/8/main/00002842.html AS3: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/media/Video.html
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 been able to get more than 25 minutes of that particular video to copy and play in GVideo.
For what it cost (free), I have no complaints. But I HOPE, HOPE, HOPE that this means that their servers are better suited to deal with significantly larger files. Especially considering the way that prices for consumer HD camcorders (with built-in HDs for recording) have come down in recent years.
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I think after about 2 months I'd say, "Screw it, I'm sick of staring at this 'buffering' animation."
-Dave
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 to re-encode it at a lower resolution? If they do go to a higher resolution, I think it's safe to say that uploaders will account for it and send in videos at a better resolution. There just was never a need to before.
I think this is excellent news.
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.
The thing that drives me nuts with YouTube is their fixed movie radio (4:3).
:-(
There's so much good content in 16:9 but encoded in 4:3 by YouTube.
When I watch full screen on my 16:9 monitor, I have 1.5" of black bars all around the movie.
YouTube gurus, please fix that!
.....That all the little emo fucktards will now look 'REALLY SAD'? Just what we need, hi-def whining
-Cnik
they want their 14.4 modem back.
If you don't have mplayer, I'm sure any video player worth its disk space would have similar features; anyway, mplayer is multiplatform, so there's hardly any excuse.
There ya go!
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
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.
Vimeo.com has partnered with Canon and is now doing HD video streaming. It's really really cool.
But it requires Windows. Not everybody has that OS.
Perl You Tube Uploader
I absolutely love this script. I even wrote a wrapper for it which has my password and login and uses the file name as the description, etc.
If I have a ton of videos I need to upload, right before I go to bed I just do a youtube_batch *.mp4. When I wake up everything is online.
Direct link to perl script
When you consider that a lot of YouTube videos are loading really slowly across the UK (yes, I have tested this).
While this is a good idea in the future, I think first priority should be ensuring that ALL videos load at an acceptable speed. 4kbps is not an acceptable speed.
I guess they'll have to be satisfied with the mere 90%.
relive all the glorious awkwardness of the teenage years in high res. I've always wanted to experience low brow home video complete with more prominent acne, shinier braces and burgeoning facial fuzz. Is it possible that people will post less once the skin enhancing blur of low quality is taken away and their imperfections become more glaring?
And python. Not everyone has that either.
Higher resolution will be great, but the question for me is will they allow widescreen videos?
That can't beat stage6.divx.com way of doing it.
Just double click on the video, and you have fullscreen AND hardware-accelerated video.
No cpu-hogging, full-of-artifacts, crappy flash video.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
The AppleTV already gets pretty high quality video from youtube. I wonder if they are adapting that for the masses.
Find a friend with an appletv or an Apple store and check it out!
Think Deeply.
UTube.com used to be a video sharing website back in 2000. After the bubble burst, UTube.com was transferred to Universal Pipe company, the current owner who is suing YouTube.com for "traffic trespass" -- what kind of IP world has America and the Multi-National created for us? What WTO infocracy looms over us in the future ---? Where is the individual in our modern, super-fast society?