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YouTube Revamp Imminent?
An anonymous reader writes "YouTube's latest blog post indicated that some changes are on the way. Google has opened up a call to submit and vote on ideas. HTML 5 open video with Free formats has dominated the vote, maintaining over twice as many votes as the next-highest item almost since the vote opened up. You may vote here (Google login required). Perhaps we don't even need to since their blog post comes suspiciously soon after their revised merger with On2. Could these improvements be a completely overhauled YouTube 2.0?"
There seems to be a rather loud outcry for HTML5 in the idea list. Many of the top ten ideas use that phrase and nothing else of substance.
There's only one problem. It ain't finished yet. So we've got the same problems 801.11n had a few years ago. It's hard to implement a moving spec.
This is like the open source proponents who mentioned Ogg Vorbis a few years ago as a solution to DRM, and it's clear now that DRM-free watermarked MP3 is the winner in the marketplace today. Even worse, it's the same people behind it... Ogg's video spec 's used to be called out by name for being used in HTML5 and that's still under debate. Open Source fans including Mozilla support it, while owners of other video codecs of course think they shouldn't be locked out.
So... really, HTML5 doesn't solve Google's problems with YouTube. Using HTML5 without calling for a codec is like an incomplete function call. You need to say which codec you want YouTube to use, or we could just see HTML5 + Flash on YouTube while other sites use other codecs....and not make much of a change.
Standards are good... but we're still in a format war over HMTL5 that makes it nearly impossible to implement it right now.
More like YouTube Beta.
Google seems to have a policy of talking about new ways to do things, and not making changes suddenly. Afterall, YouTube is the dominant video sharing site right now, and they don't want to let an open source format make them risk their status. So, it looks like HTML5 is going to get a good kick from Google telling them "Hey, we'll use whatever you tell us... but you've got to finish the spec first!" We'll see what this does to that.
Whatever they do, make sure everything is back compatible with pre-existing stuff. In particular, they need to make sure that whatever they do 1) doesn't break already existing embedded videos and 2) doesn't result in changes to what links are valid for existing videos. 2 is harder than it might seem since the video URLs they use are complicated with multiple forms able to go to the same video. Breaking either 1 or 2 would damage a lot of the internet and also just annoy a lot of people.
At all things interface.
1) YouTube: look up the term "aspect ratio". One would think somebody at Google would have heard of this. Many of their videos are uploaded in the wrong ratio. Let us override the specified ratio so we can watch videos in the correct proportions.
2) Multiple monitor support. It turns out that some people these days have more than one monitor. Some of these people might want to do something else with their computers while using one to watch a full screen video. So don't minimize the full screen video unless we tell you to. Bonus points for supporting more than one screen of video.
3) The More From and Related Videos boxes should scale to take advantage of big screens, both horizontally and vertically. Since often one is searching for other videos in a series, put them in some kind of order-- alphabetical would be a nice option.
I loathe it with all my being, please for the love of god do this, somehow!
YouTube usable without flash.
My only reason for using a proprietary OS.
Youtube has a large (and ever-increasing) following on mobile devices -- iPhone, Symbian, etc. These low-powered devices are generally able to play video using hardware acceleration.
One guess as to which codec is likely to have more widespread hardware acceleration.... Youtube is unlikely to alienate mobile users by picking Ogg Vorbis.
On the up-side; since Internet Explorer is unlikely in the near future to support HTML5 (let alone <video>), I predict that if Youtube does go the HTML5 path, there will still be a Flash fallback.
How many of you logged in and voted? Out of those, how many looked at the address bar to determine if you were on a Google site?
What about improved content? Junk is still junk even if delivered via open standards.
I have been calling for Flash to be killed with fire for a long time. It's by far the worst internet technology still in use. It even beats out ActiveX (possibly even for vulnerabilities too!). I strongly hope google does this.
It's their job to get all content online ; It's your job to filter through all the junk ... .. Not theirs .. We don't need a Youtube quality police; just like we don't need any fashion police.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Google already said that they can't do YouTube in Ogg because the Internet does not have enough bandwidth. The back end of YouTube is MPEG-4 H.264. No matter what format you upload your video in, it's converted to H.264 and that is the primary copy. The upcoming YouTube redesign has also been revealed to be essentially porting the mobile version of YouTube to the desktop. That means HTML5 and MPEG-4, which is what mobiles all use.
An ISO MPEG-4 audio video player is already built into EVERYTHING, there is no opportunity to change it now. Blu-Ray, set-top boxes, smartphones, iPod and other media players, GPU's, Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime, iTunes, game consoles, Safari, and Chrome all have H.264. If you don't publish MPEG-4, you might as well send your video encrypted with AES-256 and don't send the key. Nobody can play it if it's not MPEG-4. Ogg is a hobbyist format, suitable for ripping your CD/DVD onto a Linux box and watching them yourself, not suitable for sharing. Sharing requires that you use the community codec, which is what MPEG is all about for 20 years now.
Also, aside from the players, there is the whole professional toolchain of cameras, recorders, editing suites, encoders, servers. All of it is MPEG-4 because it's the standardization of QuickTime and that was already built into all the tools. Tools that supported proprietary QuickTime were upgraded fairly easily and quickly to support open ISO MPEG-4. Audio video is bigger than the Web. Audio video standardization is more successful than Web standardization. The idea that the W3C is going to tell Pixar and Dolby and such how to make audio video is insane. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, not the entire world.
And if we want to close one eye to professional content producers, we can open the other to amateurs who have, for example, a Flip camcorder that creates MPEG-4 H.264, or an iPhone camcorder that creates MPEG-4 H.264 and emails clips right from the iPhone. Users are not going to do a round trip through a PC so they can convert that MPEG-4 to Ogg before they share it. Especially not when all their video players have H.264 in their hardware already. That is why an iPod can play more hours of MPEG-4 H.264 than many laptops: the iPod has an "MPEG-4 CPU" so to speak, a dedicated chip that decodes the video with maximum efficiency. It doesn't have a big general purpose CPU like a PC. Multiple codecs is an AUTHORING side thing, not a consumer side thing. You use various codecs on a workstation to get your editing done, you don't demand that the consumer have a dozen codecs in their video player, it's not practical. The community agrees on one consumer codec and we all use it, just like CD/DVD, and everybody wins. Not the Linux community, the free software community, or the Web community ... the audio video community: MPEG.
This whole debate happened 10 years ago already. You're way too late to change the consumer audio video standard to something other than MPEG-4 H.264/AAC. And you certainly can't change it to something that isn't at least technically superior. Consider that Adobe Flash was the de facto HTML4 video player that is being replaced by the audio and video tags and associated JavaScript API's in HTML5. The video codec in Flash is ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC for some years now. The Web is already an ISO MPEG-4 player in HTML4. It will continue to be in HTML5 because that's the format all the video is stored in. Including YouTube, iTunes, Blu-Ray, and all the movies people are shooting with their camcorders.
In short, Ogg is out for technical reasons: it requires too much bandwidth, it doesn't exist in the players, it doesn't exist in the cameras, it doesn't exist in the editing tools, it is not in the game at all.
1) YouTube: look up the term "aspect ratio". One would think somebody at Google would have heard of this. Many of their videos are uploaded in the wrong ratio. Let us override the specified ratio so we can watch videos in the correct proportions.
Can we also fix the "Tilt yer Head" series of videos? This isn't Google's problem... it's a PEPKAC situation. Users fail.
2) Multiple monitor support. It turns out that some people these days have more than one monitor. Some of these people might want to do something else with their computers while using one to watch a full screen video. So don't minimize the full screen video unless we tell you to. Bonus points for supporting more than one screen of video.
Again, not YouTube's problem. Your browser is doing this for you. They need to fix it.
3) The More From and Related Videos boxes should scale to take advantage of big screens, both horizontally and vertically. Since often one is searching for other videos in a series, put them in some kind of order-- alphabetical would be a nice option.
Again, user error. If it's a series, it should be uploaded in order. Go to the user's page. Related episodes sorts the series by content, not sequence. More form this user gives you the most recent episodes. If you want the back catelog, you want the user page.
How about calling for reform of the DMCA system on YouTube?
Currently, it's possible for a content creator to have his or her video taken down for copyright infringement from what is functionally an anonymous party. While YouTube's DMCA claim form DOES ask for name, phone number and address, none of these items are verified before YouTube goes ahead and takes these videos down.
Because of this, there's a lot of False DMCA action on the site from people who are only interested in suppressing others viewpoints.
Since people on slashdot for the most part care about Freedom of Speech, I urge you all to upvote the DMCA reform issue on there.
Thank you.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Don't forget how out of hand the DMCA notices have gotten. Videos that are clearly fair-use are have their entire audio tracks wiped out, even when audio is a major component of the video.
Google will announce automated comment generation as a new feature, citing users' complaints that it is too time consuming to type out grammatically incorrect sentences and spam.
""Slashdot -style comment moderation and filtering."
trreeves, Portland, OR - "
He must be new here...or have no idea what /. is about
I suggested More porn...
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
Youtube is a byword for horrifyingly stupid and banal comments. The best Youtube comments still make Slashdot seem like a collection of Nobel prizewinners.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
It would be nice if they simply revamped their login system. Right now I have an older "unlinked" google account and every time I try to login with it I get an infinite redirect loop. Yes, I cleared my cookies and the problem occurs on Firefox, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer. I used to be able to login fine just a few weeks ago. What does it take to get support from YouTube with login troubles? Is anyone else experiencing login issues?
And changes must be forwards compatible, so that a file encoded in the new format can still be properly played by a browser implementing the minimal version of Ogg, at a similar quality level.
And in fact, both Theora and Vorbis have bitstream formats that are frozen in just the manner you suggest. Old decoders can decode new streams, even those produced by the newer "Thusnelda" and "AoTuV" encoders.
First, come up with a way to detect duplicate videos. I'm so tired of thieves recopying videos and siphoning off hits from the original content provider. Second, I'd love for a way to find my past comments. There's currently no way to do this. Yes, there's a lot of idiocy on YouTube but I love browsing videos for laughs and even the commercials have been kept to a respectable limit. People get to post stupid, funny, cute, and creative movies that normally only family members or friends would get to enjoy.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
How about they fix the bloated, slow-to-load youtube.com homepage and replace it with something clean and simple like the Google homepage?
So that I can keep playing the same music videos over and over and get to work instead of coming back to youtube every 5minutes and pressing play.
After going to vote, it's extremely obvious that slashdot crowd has taken reign over this voting page.
Can you PLEASE STOP posting specific highly technical changes that the average user will not understand.
Sure, blabber on about H.6969 decoding formats while you're in your basement with your friends. BUT LISTEN PEOPLE. If you want Google and Youtube to change, and change for the good of the Open Source and Freedom of speed world, lets keep our suggestion to "Use HTML5 for video, not flash". or something similar. The next "please use \this\ codec" I'm going to vote no.
All I want is to be able to download a free and open source Linux distribution, Install it and watch a video on Youtube. Couldn't care less if it's HTML412.80211g or H.2342333(revision9).
How about a way to contest bullshit Flags on your videos, or better yet, the bullshit Warnings on your account that occured due to not being able to contest bullshit Flaggings? You can get flagged for nudity for showing a bit of sideboob, but it's apparently okay for Columbia Pictures to host Blue Lagoon completely uncensored. Some fucking accountability for YouTube's administration and some CONSISTENCY in how they enforce rules is all I fucking ask for.
From OGG theora home page:
Theora 1, like MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, H.263, H.264 and so on is fozen and finished. The bitstream will never change.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Flash is a native H264 library, and if you don't have it, you aren't using YouTube.
YouTube still encodes video in H.263 for playback on downlevel Flash Players like the one in Wii's Internet Channel.
It would also get us the ability to use purely open source software for our web browsing again, or at least for our YouTube -- no need for Flash. It'd also give us the ability to right-click and do something like "save video as", or click+drag a video to our desktop, or email. It'd also greatly simplify anything else which just wants the video -- for example, any sort of set-top box, etc, now only needs a web browser, or even just something that can scrape the YouTube HTML, instead of a web browser and a Flash port.
Is there a solution for all of Google's overlay features and customer spying- i mean, statistics and market intelligence capabilities, in this scenario you envision?
I'm assuming anything that prevents i.e. second by second reporting of how much of the video you watch, or current and future in-frame advertising capabilities, is pretty much a non-starter.
They may not be "evil," but they are in the ad business.
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Youtube is a byword for horrifyingly stupid and banal comments. The best Youtube comments still make Slashdot seem like a collection of Nobel prizewinners.
dude u talk leik a fag. get teh fuk of /. bitch. u r fuking cancerz!
I don't care what ends up being used as long as it is open source and has improved performance over flash.
My sister needed a cheap laptop to do some work at home, so without much research, walked into a BestBuy and purchased one. Playing Hulu shows on it is very choppy. Whatever video format is used should at least play smoothly on computers sitting on store shelves, or at least scale well enough to handle a wider range of hardware.
Is there a solution for all of Google's overlay features
What do you mean by this?
customer spying- i mean, statistics and market intelligence capabilities
Sure, they assume most people will be watching it through a YouTube page. Even if you only grab the naked video, though, they still get your cookies and your IP.
I'm assuming anything that prevents i.e. second by second reporting of how much of the video you watch,
I'm sure they can live without that -- though again, they'd be assuming most people would watch it through the web player.
or current and future in-frame advertising capabilities,
You can already avoid all of the above by using a video downloader. You can also avoid them on any website using an adblocker extension -- yet Google says they welcome adblockers, think they are good for the Web.
And think about it -- if it was really so ludicrous that they'd do this,
As a user, why would I use the HTML version? Simple: First, it's easier for me to remove ads than in the Flash version, if I'm not going to download it. Second, I'm lazy -- much lazier to stream than to download. Third, sometimes the annotations are actually worth reading, or sometimes I want to comment -- all of that's right there, versus having to go find the page again after downloading.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
http://i.imgur.com/aYxzrl.png
Persian Project Management Software as a Service
What do you mean by this?
Words in boxes can be laid over the video for periods of time that the user selects.
Presumably there are current and future advertising possibilities to this, beyond just allowing users to scribble on their content.
Sure, they assume most people will be watching it through a YouTube page
I'm sure they can live without that
I'm not.
Youtube currently provides detailed data about the behavior of viewers within the video - including their main interactions with the player. I'm just guessing here, but an open source codec playing a naked video seems highly unlikely to report back to somewhere about how many seconds the viewer watched, or where they hit pause, or what they rewound and watched again.
Flash will happily do it, and whatever else it's programmed to do. More to the point, virtually every flash player in wide use does do this.
Advertisers are accustomed to having this information - and they care about it, because they get little other equivalent, fine-grained feedback about how viewers like the content.
You can already avoid all of the above by using a video downloader.
Right, but users of those are like linux users - a minority. Small enough to be a rounding error, frankly.
Google may be wise enough to know that they can't force savvy users to do anything, there is no point in trying, and it doesn't matter anyway.
Why does Google offer many entirely ad-free services?
You're saying that google cares so little about ad revenue on what they do that they may ditch flash anyway.
You may be right. They certainly offer an extraordinary amount of "pro bono" web services.
Let's make a bet. I think they disappoint everyone on HTML5, and on top of that, you will see them finding more ways to monetize what they currently give away for free.
The only way I see it going the other way is if HTML5 video had feature parity with Flash. Or Google made it so. Then you might see it adopted on Youtube.
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I think it's a shame that the submitter failed to notice that the 2nd most common response was with regard to the DMCA. Apparently a lot of uploaders are unhappy about that fact that their videos get taken down by false DMCA claims. It seems that DMCA and HTML5 form ~90% of suggestions/complaints.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
They already have such a bit of code. It's called a "playlist", as seen here.
they don't provide any framework or support, and in fact work against, any efforts that might be made outside the United States to develop a less-crippled Firefox.
Because Mozilla frankly doesn't need to. That's the job for an extension that rewrites <video> elements with type video/mp4 in pages into <object> elements that call the built-in QuickTime plug-in for anyone who has iTunes installed. Apple could even include such an extension in the QuickTime plug-in's installer.
Words in boxes can be laid over the video for periods of time that the user selects.
Ah, the annotations. Trivial to do in HTML5.
Youtube currently provides detailed data about the behavior of viewers within the video - including their main interactions with the player. I'm just guessing here, but an open source codec playing a naked video seems highly unlikely to report back to somewhere about how many seconds the viewer watched,
Yes, you are obviously just guessing, and you're dead wrong.
The codec doesn't do the reporting, that's true. Neither does h.264. It's the Flash that does the reporting.
HTML5 has fairly sophisticated Javascript integration. There's absolutely nothing stopping client-side Javascript from reporting exactly the same statistics back to Google.
Flash will happily do it, and whatever else it's programmed to do.
Right. Flash doesn't just magically do this, you have to program it to do so -- just as Google did, and just as they'll do with HTML5.
More to the point, virtually every flash player in wide use does do this.
What makes you think Google just picked up a Flash video widget off the shelf? They wrote their own -- which makes the process exactly the same in HTML as it would be in Flash.
Right, but users of those are like linux users - a minority. Small enough to be a rounding error, frankly.
Frankly, about the same as you'd get with right-click and save-as -- and more than you think, I would guess. In particular, anyone who "mirrors" a YouTube video, or includes clips of others' YouTube videos in their own, if they do it intelligently, they do it by snatching with something like Video Downloader.
Google may be wise enough to know that they can't force savvy users to do anything, there is no point in trying, and it doesn't matter anyway.
Exactly my point.
You're saying that google cares so little about ad revenue on what they do that they may ditch flash anyway.
No, I'm saying they get plenty of ad revenue from "normal" users. There's really no reason to think they'd get less by sticking Vorbis in a <video> tag.
I'm saying that you're right, they don't really care about people using something like a video downloader, so they'll care about as much about the fact that an HTML widget could enable the same thing, only with far less of a kludge.
Let's make a bet. I think they disappoint everyone on HTML5,
They already have an HTML5 player. Not a very good one, but it exists.
and on top of that, you will see them finding more ways to monetize what they currently give away for free.
Yes, they generally do that, but tastefully, as they realize that if they turn into, oh, ign.com, they'll only drive the adoption of ad blockers. It's in their best interest to not overly annoy users.
The only way I see it going the other way is if HTML5 video had feature parity with Flash.
Every single one of the features you mentioned, yes, it does. Combine it with SVG, and the differences become even smaller and more boring.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Ah, the annotations. Trivial to do in HTML5.
Good to know.
Yes, you are obviously just guessing, and you're dead wrong.
OK, that's cool.
The codec doesn't do the reporting, that's true. Neither does h.264. It's the Flash that does the reporting.
Duh.
HTML5 has fairly sophisticated Javascript integration. There's absolutely nothing stopping client-side Javascript from reporting exactly the same statistics back to Google.
Well OK then.
What makes you think Google just picked up a Flash video widget off the shelf?
Nothing.
There's really no reason to think they'd get less by sticking Vorbis in a tag.
Certainly not if there's feature parity with the existing solution.
They already have [youtube.com] an HTML5 player. Not a very good one, but it exists.
Given what you describe of HTML5's APIs, then we might see more of it after all.
Every single one of the features you mentioned, yes, it does. Combine it with SVG, and the differences become even smaller and more boring.
Actually this sounds quite nice; you've got me interested to the point where I'll be giving HTML5 a much closer look. I hope you can forgive me for being shocked that the standards bodies had anything so substantial or useful up their sleeves. If the browser itself can finally out-Flash Flash, and we can finally kick that buggy pile of crap to the curb, then the next round of drinks is on me.
Then again, even if MS can't think of a good reason not to implement the standard, won't they still make IE incompatible just out of spite?
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