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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."
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.
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