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."
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.
The big question for me is whether or not they will raise the video length limit for standard uploads. I take plenty of my own video and put it on YouTube but I have to constantly remember the small file size (100MB) and video length (10 minutes) when I'm taping...
I don't care as much what the resolution is, but it would be nice to have those limits raised.
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.
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
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.