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Higher-Resolution YouTube Videos Currently In Testing

Posted by Zonk on from the someday-that-dog-shall-rule-the-world dept.

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."

4 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs by l-ascorbic · · Score: 5, Informative

    It already is.

  2. Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs by tknd · · Score: 5, Informative

    Some guy in the comments on the blog downloaded both formats and they came out in exactly the same size. People here are also commenting that they only changed to support H.264. This means that they do not have higher bandwidth needs, but higher processing needs due to a smarter codec (H.264).

    Personally I've played around with x264 and the improvements in quality are pretty impressive with enough encoding time and the right encoding parameters thrown at the encoding process.

  3. Re:iPhone quality? by dtfinch · · Score: 5, Informative

    &fmt=18 gives you the h264 iphone video, also playable in the latest Flash 9.0 r115.
    &fmt=6 gives you the comparable quality but higher bitrate Flash video which works on older Flash players.

    And &fmt=17 gives you a crappy low bitrate very low resolution mpeg4 video for older/cheaper phones, but it isn't playable in Flash.

  4. Confirmed! Specs, Screenshots and links galore! by appleguru · · Score: 5, Informative

    Cheers! Verified.. I downloaded the video files for each format from youtube.. they are as follows:

    Presumably anything that's available on the iphone will be available in fmt 18 and/or fmt 17. 18 looks good ;)

    Here's a screenshot that compares the formats: http://g.appleguru.org/youtubeformats.png

    And here are download links and details on each of them :)

    No format tag (standard):
    320x240 @ 29.97 fps
    Flash video (Sorenson h.263)
    MP3 Audio (22.05KHz, mono)
    FLV container
    3.28MB
    http://g.appleguru.org/nofmt.flv

    Format 6 tag:
    448x298 @ 29.98fps
    Flash video (Sorenson h.263)
    MP3 Audio (44.1KHz, mono)
    FLV Conatiner
    9.44MB
    http://g.appleguru.org/fmt6.flv

    Format 17 tag:
    176x144 @ 12fps
    MPEG-4 Video (simple profile)
    MPEG-4 (AAC) audio (22.05KHz, mono)
    3gp container
    832KB
    http://g.appleguru.org/fmt17.3gp

    Format 18 tag:
    480x320 @ 29.97fps
    MPEG-4 Video (H.264)
    MPEG-4 (AAC) audio (44.1KHz, STEREO!)
    mp4 container
    6.28MB
    http://g.appleguru.org/fmt18.mp4

    Coolness :-)

    --
    appleguru.org