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

Converting

[RandoX]

they do have millions upon millions of videos that they need to do.

Really? I would argue that of the millions of videos on the net that I think need to be at a higher quality, very few of them are on YouTube.

High Quality? I think Not.

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

When Youtube upgrades the quality of their VIDEOS and not the quality of the video FILES ... then I'll be interested. For now, as so many others have said ... Youtube is adequate for watching 15 year olds set themselves on fire ;)

Re:High Quality? I think Not.

[JustinOpinion]

Actually I would argue that there is plenty of worthwhile content on YouTube (and I'm not talking about unauthorized uploads of TV shows). The thing is that YouTube is like the Internet at large: there is lots of crap so if you just randomly poke around you will of course see a predominance of crap.

If you browse YouTube a bit, and subscribe to the channels that are actually worthwhile, you will quickly build up a feed of interesting stuff with new videos every day. You can use featured videos to get some ideas of new channels to consider. On the other hand, using "most viewed" and "currently watching" to find good stuff is a waste of time. As a random example of something "worthwhile" (in my opinion), consider Wallstrip--a show that does profiles on companies and stock trends, and is infused with sarcasm and wit. There are also channels that discuss science, that do decent original comedy, there is a national geographic channel, etc.

Frankly I think YouTube is dropping the ball a bit by not providing a more useful method of finding the best content. An Amazon-like "people who subscribe/rate like you also like..." would help alot. Just as Slashdot uses various tricks (moderation, friends/foes, etc.) to bring attention to the quality material, YouTube should work harder to bring the good material to the top. The current star-ratings, comment-ratings, and ranking-by-viewing are not working very well. Frankly I don't care about the ratings of YouTube at large; I care about the ratings of a finite subset of like-minded users.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[MikeXpop]

That guy was using a third party downloader, which doesn't account for the high quality video. He unknowingly downloaded the same video twice. While the regular youtube video is indeed 3.4 MB, the high quality one is 9.5 MB. Here's a picture showing the filesize

One other interesting thing is that I haven't been able to find another high-quality video on youtube. I tried the &fmt=6 parameter on several videos, both popular and new. Two of these videos (a Fall Out Boy video and an NBA recap) loaded with the parameter, but didn't look any better. A quick check showed that the same .flv files were being loaded no matter what parameter I set. Does anyone have any examples of high quality videos besides the dog?