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

How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs???

[Joe The Dragon]

How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs???

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.

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.

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.

iPhone quality?

[SuperKendall]

I'd noticed that using the iPhone to view videos on WiFi, gave a notable better picture than the web version. I think the flag is accessing the same video the iPhone makes use of.

AppleTV also makes use of this higher level of quality I believe.

Re:iPhone quality?

[moderatorrater]

I think it's the resolution difference between the iphone, your tv and your computer monitor. On the iphone or your TV, the resolution is closer to that of youtube, so you don't notice the low quality, whereas on your monitor, they can devote 30 or 40 pixels to the aliasing on the low quality video. I noticed this effect a year and a half ago when watching youtube videos through a computer hooked to a tv - the video looked nearly perfect because of the resolution difference.

Just goes to show you that sometimes, lower quality is better.

Re:iPhone quality?

[nevali]

It was widely reported (and by that I mean, Steve Jobs stood up on stage and announced it) that Google were storing all new videos as H.264 (and steadily converting old ones) for both the iPhone/iPod touch and Apple TV.

I would imagine this initiative is related to that.

Re:iPhone quality?

[anotherone]

iPhone loads the higher quality .MP4 video because it can't play .flv - Apple TV probably does the same thing for the same reason.

Re:iPhone quality?

[dtfinch]

&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.

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:iPhone quality?

[webrunner]

Something is weird... whenever I look at a fmt=18 video it's noticeably blurrier with heavier artifacting then the regular video. And usually fmt=6 doesn't work for those same videos. Some individual frames seem a little sharper, but generally the video is worse on fmt=18 then no fmt at all.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[Lord Haw Haw]

The cable to Japan could help!

Lawyers will love this

[gilesjuk]

At the moment the quality is ropey at times, you can say that it's no substitute for a real DVD (When there's a copyrighted file on the site, not that that's allowed).

Once it approaches DVD quality the lawyers will argue it's like DVD on demand.

H.264 on iPhone already

[MouseR]

iPhone users have been enjoying H.264-encoded YouTube for many months already.

To be frank, I've not been on YouTube.com ever since I've gotten the iPhone. The video quality is SO much better on H.264 than crap^H^H^H^H flash players that it's worth wasting time with it. Plus, you can actually pause, fast-forward, rewind and skip to any point without it failing like flash players always do.

Re:H.264 on iPhone already

[MostAwesomeDude]

Youtube is free, and it's not worth $400 just for a little piece of black plastic that plays the same H.264 video that VLC and mplayer have had for years.

Also Apple's Quicktime MPEG4 library has some significant deficiencies; they don't implement the entire standard.

And Google video?

[zebslash]

What about Google Video? Would that work too?

Re:And Google video?

[The Queen]

The project I'm involved with uploads to Google Video and Veoh simultaneously; we had to quit using YouTube because we're doing half-hour episodes and they have size limitations. (Where do they get off putting limits on their free service? Bah!) The director was having to chop things up into 10-minute chunks. Hence, Veoh, which is good quality but apparently not as popular.

Google Video is a markedly lower quality than what we get on Veoh; but for folks who don't want to be forced to sign up (or who have older machines that can't load their player) we have the Google option.

It would make me very happy if this positively affected Google Video.

Quality problem

[sunderland56]

Note to YouTube: forcing your users to upload a crappy resolution compressed/downsized video, and then upsampling it to a higher resolution, does NOT produce a high-quality video. How about allowing people to upload decent quality videos in the first place??

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[__aaptsy9143]

They just have to add more Tubes!

Technically..

[Junta]

Flash 9 supports h264 video codec.

Re:Technically..

[SanityInAnarchy]

Knowing Flash, it may or may not be worth it.

Apparently, recently, they've added the ability for video decoding to be hardware-accelerated, but only when the video is fullscreen. I'm still amazed that the vector graphics aren't accelerated, even if it's when Flash is a plugin -- at this rate, we'll have hardware-accelerated SVG in Firefox before we'll have properly hardware-accelerated Flash.

Now, when YouTube has the option to also serve the video in a straight mp4 container (or similar)...

Re:Technically..

[Skuld-Chan]

Oh? http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Astro

Not only does FlashPlayer 10 have 2D/3D acceleration, but also supports gpu's. Search youtube for Flash Player Astro for videos of it in action - its pretty cool.

Re:To state the obvious

[bendodge]

According to some reports, yes, they have kept the originals.

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:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[ZerdZerd]

I hope H.264 will be available in flash soon. Stage6 had to close because of the expenses in delivering HQ videos, which is bad news.

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.

[owlnation]

... actually there is high quality content Youtube -- the copyrighted stuff.

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:High Quality? I think Not.

[skeeto]

You must not be aware of it, but just about every video on YouTube is copyrighted.

Re:High Quality? I think Not.

[jonasj]

Can you provide a link to a video on YouTube that is not copyrighted?

I can! http://uk.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4806B1FAAC9C7DE1

Same great pixels, more bits please

[SuperBanana]

YouTube has never really been known for streaming videos at a high resolution,

The problem isn't necessarily resolution- it's the unbelievably low bitrates, and the fact that they insist on re-encoding everything that's uploaded to them. It's apparently possible to upload FLV in a very precise way such that they don't re-encode, but they could make it a lot easier (and it's to their advantage- every video given to them ready-to-go is a video they don't have to waste incoming bandwidth, temporary disk storage, and bandwidth on.)

What youtube *should* be doing is offering paid accounts which allow for higher bitrate videos; say, a low-end for the camwhores who want better pixels for their whining, a mid-level for guys like Will It Blend, and a top-end account for big companies that want to push their ads out on Youtube. Will It Blend, for example, would probably plunk down $20/month to get better videos.

Sadly, though- companies like blip.tv have already filled the niche of high-quality videos, and they're getting attacked left and right by other sites like metafilter which already does revenue sharing...and there are a billion and one embedded FLV hosting sites...

Conversion

[Tavor]

I must say, it looks nice for the most part. Though I would prefer my videos be higher resolution to begin with, not "converted" down then back up -- it would prevent those little slight things you see in the video.

Wow, like what they have been doing all this time?

[SmallFurryCreature]

What do you think they are converting you lamebrain? They kept the originals, so no upsampling needed (doesn't really work anyway), they just RE-encode the original.

Re:To state the obvious

[TubeSteak]

According to some reports, yes, they have kept the originals. Which leads to the next question:
If I delete a video from YouTube, do they delete the source file?

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[l-ascorbic]

It already is.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[tknd]

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.

CPU Loading

[Detritus]

High-resolution is great and wonderful, but what about the unwashed masses with older systems? I'd rather see a video play smoothly in medium resolution, rather than see it stutter in high resolution. The newer codecs seem to choke on older systems. My Mac can handle MPEG-2 without problems, but it has difficulty with some of the newer videos.

Eh? Maybe it's just me.

[Mesa MIke]

I couldn't see any difference in quality between the regular version and the "fmt=6" version of the skating dog.

I already mourn the loss of stage6

[hairykrishna]

Now stage6 has gone, there's no site that provides decent quality streaming content. Youtube should get rid of the 10 min length cap and up their quality to fill the gap in the market.

Obviously, when I say market, I mean enormous money hole...

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

[digitalhermit]

Yup. Same here.

Funny thing is that I would gladly pay $40/month for a site like Stage6. I pay around $60/month currently for cable television but rarely watch it because the shows I like are inconvenient to watch. Yeah, there's MythTV and Tivo, but there's rarely a time when I'll sit down and plan what I'm going to watch. I'd much rather browse and get that instant gratification. It would be great if the producers of these shows could come to some advertising/subscription agreement. I have looked at iTunes, but the selection there was dismal.

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

[araemo]

I suspect this is already taken care of.

I use noscript, and instead of giving youtube permanent permissions, I always give it temporary permissions. Well, in recent weeks, I've needed to grant permissions to both youtube.com and ytimg.com to get videos to play, so they seem to be farming out their bandwidth to a caching service.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[szyzyg]

At imeem.com we added h264 support earlier in the year - we pretty much just changed the codec when, but our old video bitrate was already > 768kbit/sec so we had plenty of room to up the resolution and support DVD resolutions.

of course, to get DVD resolution videos to display you need to upload dvd resolution in the first place.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[Dahamma]

Are you talking at the server end or client end?

At the client end, as people have said... using H.264 means they can increase the resolution/quality with modest bandwidth increase.

At the server end... well, do you KNOW who owns YouTube now??

Re:Wow, like what they have been doing all this ti

[Chris Pimlott]

And those originals are still limited to something like 50 or 100 megs. You are correct that videos uploaded directly via web browser are limited to 100 megabytes. However, using the (Windows-only) multi-file uploader client allows videos of up to 1GB in size.

I certainly wish I had known about this before I spent a decent amount of time re-encoding motion jpegs to get them under 100MB.

Nope

[SuperKendall]

I carefully compared screen and iPhone versions side by side with the same video, some northern lights over the north pole. Some stars in the sky and other details were clearly visible on the iPhone that were not apparent in the web version. The resolution in terms of number of pixels, I think is actually about the same. A lot of that could just come down to compression artifacts but I thought it was interesting there was a noticeable difference.

Re:To state the obvious

[TubeSteak]

Looks like I found the answer:
http://www.youtube.com/t/terms

6. Your User Submissions and Conduct

C. ...by submitting User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license ... The above licenses granted by you in User Videos terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your User Videos from the YouTube Service. You understand and agree, however, that YouTube may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of User Submissions that have been removed or deleted.

Already Done Via Clever Users?

[bmajik]

I was checking out anime OP/ED videos a while back for a series I had started watching and came across someone that has somehow tricked youtube into letting ultra-high resolution videos on the site.

Here's an example: http://youtube.com/watch?v=2Vtrmpol390

Notice that the "clock" on the player says its 9:59 long. Note that the streaming hiccups and stutters because the actual video is only 1:30 long -- just like any other anime OP. The time-code computation appears to be totally off for this video, but the quality is fantastic. Listen with good headphones -- the audio and video quality are both fantastic in this video.

Now compare to a "normal" youtube version: http://youtube.com/watch?v=B5PoF34qM0o

This person's other movies are all other anime OP/ED sections that all say they are around 10 minutes long, but in reality are all 1:30 or so.

So it seems this person has figured out how to exploit something in youtubes video analysis/recoder to get ultra-high quality audio/video, at the expense of breaking the media-length calculations.

Re:Already Done Via Clever Users?

[pjoyce1]

The exploit used to upload these videos (changing the file header so the bitrate seemed to be less than 348kbps) was closed by YouTube a while ago. For normal accounts, YT re-encodes all uploaded video, even .flv below their target bitrate. I did a bunch of testing recently and blip.tv was the only major site that would not compress uploaded flash. The best bit for YT is to upload a large and high-quality original and make use of the &fmt=18 parameter to access the H.264 version. The audio and video improvements can be dramatic.

Re:very low frame rate

[ben there...]

They probably use only the basic "blend" form of deinterlacing, rather than checking whether it is best to use IVTC for "Film" (typical DVD) or one of the fancier deinterlacing methods like TomsMoComp for "NTSC" video (typical camcorder).

It's probably best to deinterlace video yourself prior to uploading to YouTube, if you care about quality.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[immcintosh]

It's a noticeable difference to me. Specifically, edges are substantially less noisy in the high quality version, whereas in the low quality version there are some pretty obvious compression artifacts around edges.

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?

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?

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[jericho4.0]

"Piggy backing"? Your ISP probably hasn't provided much content lately, have they?

Oh great...

[coolhaus]

Now I can get rickrolled with more pixels than before.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[HobophobE]

Perfume - Polyrhythm (Japanese music video): http://youtube.com/watch?v=qjL_FM23FzU&fmt=6

Touhou 8 - Final Boss (Japanese video game): http://youtube.com/watch?v=UOWR1_uMdW8&fmt=6

CNN/Univision Debate: http://youtube.com/watch?v=_BGyWYtee18&fmt=6

These are the only ones I found (the skate dog shows up too) in a google search for site:youtube.com "fmt=6"

http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:youtube.com+%22fmt%3D6%22&num=100&hl=en&safe=off&filter=0

My guess at this point is they are reencoding the original uploads iff they are higher bitrate than the old codec youtube was using.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[MikeXpop]

Thanks. Someone else linked to their own video of a DOOM hack demo here. The quality is pretty bad but is horrendous without the parameter. I've also found a video of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals here.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[ischorr]

I'm not THAT interested in this quirk, just a little bit. =)

But I tried a few different things, viewing the video WITHOUT the &fmt=6 first:

- FF3 on XP - Same with/without the &fmt=6
- FF2 on XP - Same with/without the &fmt=6
- IE6 on XP - Same
- FF3 on Mac 10.4 - Same with/without
- Safari 3 on Mac - DIFFERENT with/without the &fmt=6
- Opera on Mac 10.4 - DIFFERENT with/without
- Opera on XP - DIFFERENT with/without ...So it looks to me like Firefox and IE users get the high-quality video by default, whereas Safari and Opera (and maybe other browsers) get the low-quality one? That's weird.

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[Anonymous Coward]

Install this Greasemonkey script. You don't need Javascript at all to watch Youtube clips.

Mod parent "-1 whoosh"

[Dr. Evil]

d'oh

Re:How will they handle the higher bandwidth needs

[Anonymous Coward]

Would that be YourTubes, MyTubes, or TheirTubes?

Stone age sound

[DF5JT]

[Examples of HQ youtube video]

And still monaural sound.

I don't get it. What is it that made people accept this abysmal stone age technique? We have two ears, they give sound a spacial dimension and there is nothing better enhancing the video experience than giving it a great sound.

Monaural. How ultra retro - AM broadcast quality of the 60s.

Painful for those with ears, alas.

Re:Stone age sound

[MikeXpop]

It's not really important how many are mono/stereo, but how many should be mono/stereo. I imagine there is a large number of videos that, through some program or another, ended up doubling the mono track on both channels. Even those videos that were recorded in stereo, most either have the effect lost through microphone positioning or just through the subject matter itself (If someone filmed a speech at a rally, for example).

The bottom line for Youtube is that keeping monaural sound is an easy way to cut the audio size of videos in half with results that only 5-10% of users will notice/care about.

Confirmed! Specs, Screenshots and links galore!

[appleguru]

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 :-)

Re:Confirmed! Specs, Screenshots and links galore!

[appleguru]

There's also a fmt13 tag, that gives the following!

Format 13 tag:
176x144 @ 15fps
H.263 Video
AMR Narrowband Audio (8KHz, mono)
3gp container
700KB
http://g.appleguru.org/fmt13.3gp

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.

Competition

[Monsieur_F]

Dailymotion announced HD support some weeks ago, so I guess Youtube wants to have that too.