Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
"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.
Though back on topic, it will be nice to watch something on there that is still watchable at full screen.
Ya, until the tubes get clogged with all those High_Quality videos.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
The internet in general is getting further away, like an expanding universe, from the capacity of dial-up. I've contemplated the point where DSL will begin to look like beaten down 56K due to the size of pages and volume of content.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
YouTube was terrible from the very beginning. The only reason anyone puts up with the site is because it is so popular, and the only reason that it is popular is because of the media coverage of the Lazy Sunday removal. Of course, even if YouTube was genuinely good from the beginning, it would still have sunk to its current low. A popular trend with Internet sites (and everything for that matter) seems to be a decline in their overall quality, purpose, philosophy, and performance as the site in question gets more popular. Look at Facebook. Once more focused on privacy and simplicity, it has now shifted to using questionable policies and allowing people to fill their profiles with crap. Every time a new "feature" is added, it is never really needed in the first place or it undermines the principles on which Facebook was built upon.