Higher-Resolution YouTube Videos Currently In Testing

jason writes "YouTube has never really been known for streaming videos at a high resolution, but it appears that they are taking early steps at providing higher quality videos. The project was announced last year by the site's co-founder Steve Chen, and now appears to be in the earliest stages of deployment. By adding a parameter onto the end of a video's URL you're able to watch it in a higher quality (in terms of audio and video) that is actually quite noticeable. Not all videos have been converted at this point, but they do have millions upon millions of videos that they need to do."

Comments

Sweet

[QuantumRiff]

Cause dammit, I want crisp, clear flames when I'm watching a 15 year old set himself on fire!

Re:Sweet

[ArcherB]

Cause dammit, I want crisp, clear flames when I'm watching a 15 year old set himself on fire! Exactly what I was thinking... well, except my thoughts dealt with 2 girls, a cup of something and corn... but the idea was the same.

Distributed project?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now there's a distributed project idea! Forget cancer, re-encode video chunks!

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[__aaptsy9143]

They just have to add more Tubes!

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[moderatorrater]

By piggy backing on the networks of those poor, overworked ISP's that aren't getting paid by youtube. It's like youtube is stealing that bandwidth by exploiting this loophole.

Re:Converting

[Rude Turnip]

Bah, I threw out my Youtube ages ago and only watch television now. I also make a point of mentioning it at every possible opportunity on message boards.

Re:iPhone quality?

[brentonboy]

That is why when I watch full-screen videos on my computer, I always resize the monitor resolution down to as small as it can go beforehand (800x600 for me)--it improves the quality a lot!

Re:I already mourn the loss of stage6

[AutopsyReport]

I think YouPorn.com has this enormous gap / money hole thing you talk about filled already...

Re:I already mourn the loss of stage6

[pavon]

Obviously, when I say market, I mean enormous money hole... At Google's next shareholder conference call:

Google: Good news! By increasing video quality and duration we've managed to double YouTube's profits over the last quarter.
Investor: Wait, didn't YouTube have negative profits last quarter?
Google: Ah yes, that would be the bad news.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[Eudial]

How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs???

What ...BUFFERING... co...BUFFERING...uld p...BUFFERING...ossi...BUFFERING...bly g...BUFFERING...o wr...BUFFERING...ng?

Oh great...

[coolhaus]

Now I can get rickrolled with more pixels than before.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[Anonymous Coward]

Would that be YourTubes, MyTubes, or TheirTubes?

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[SnowZero]

I've watched the linked-to video several times both with and without the fmt=6 parameter, and they both look identical to me. Same in terms of blurriness, artifacting, and resolution. That's because you don't have oxygen-free monitor cables. As a result, the bits going to your monitor don't have a warm waveform; They will instead be ragged and produce low quality output. Next time don't be such a cheapo and spring for the real quality components.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[SnowZero]

h.264 does some fantastic things at low bitrates. higher processing power requirements aren't much of a concern if the video can be offloaded to an IC decoder chip on the gpu, moreover. Here's a pretty good example of what you can do with the new format.