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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."
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.
Dial up was never, ever, ever designed for applications such as streaming media.
It is 1Gb now if you use YouTube Uploader: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=55743&topic=10527
appleguru.org
When I read their instructions on how to upload videos some time ago, it suggested resizing to that size.
i work for a content promotions company, gochongo ( 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.
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