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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?"
on 2), multiple monitor support - that is an Adobe Flash issue, not a Youtube issue.
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.
It's things like this that make me wonder if it's a good idea to front a free project with a real-world rights-owning corporation that's responsible and can be sued. Mozilla's petty squabbling over their control of the Firefox name and logo is already ridiculous enough. Let's not start making less-than-ideal decisions for our software because we're worried about how it will affect The Project.
Remember this gem? It was judged that getting on the bad side of financial institutions by offering an option for non honoring the annoying "autocomplete=off" attribute that breaks the password manager half the time (even when your wallet is encrypted) is bad for the project.
I don't care if firefox succeeds, while I do care about whether a basic option is present in my most-used piece of software.
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.
Apparently not. For those too lazy to follow link, its an addon for Chrome (dev version) that makes youtube videos run in HTML5. It cuts cpu usage in half too.
Seems to me the best way to proceed is for someone to just do it, and let everyone else try to catch up. Its not like people will stop using youtube.
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.
Google's doing what the DMCA requires... what would be nice is if they had to provide proof they hold a copyright on something, and therefore reveal their identity so false claims could be taken to court.
Flash is the container. The Codec is H.264. .mov is the quicktime container. The Codec is often H.264. .mkv is a container, the Codec is often DivX.
Container formats != Codec.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The linked site was not a Google URL, the login page was a Google page with proper SSL certificate (and yes I did check to see if any of the obvious fake SSL cert techniques had been used)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Oh come on. What on earth speaks against this: /> /> ...> />
<video>
<source="elephanteatspoop.ogv" type="video/ogg"
<source="elephanteatspoop.mp4" type="video/mp4"
Get a decent browser.
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
<param name="src" value="player.swf?file=elephanteatspoop.mp4"
No video for you.
</object>
</video>
Usable right now, plays in almost all browsers. Of course you can always make it more complicated to include edge cases, but I don't like that. It's good to push people to update their browsers and get rid of opaque insecure plugins.
Also. Totem, the default movie player in Ubuntu, comes with a plugin to search and watch YouTube videos out of the box. No flash required (although I think you need to install a codec).
No, it's never been particularly awkward getting .mp3 files to play. Much as plenty of other things about running on Linux have bugged me, absolutely no problems in decoding every single codec of audio, even the more obscure .mpc, for free.
So, really it's a codec war. If there's something more universally accepted than flash... please stand up.
While real life wars are bad, this kind of war is a good one since it drives innovation, evolution and kills off a huge chunk of Flash in the process.
I don't outright HATE Flash, it is great as a container file for games and other such things.
It is still entirely possible for a JavaScript file to contain all this information as well*, but the major issue with that is the fact that JavaScript has no decent "preloader" support, or generally bandwidth measurement of any kind. (correct me if i am wrong)
The only kinds i have seen have been hacked together with 2 languages usually, and that just isn't good enough.
Until JavaScript has in-built support for this, all the Flash games out there will never move over.
* The best solution for file storage would be compressed binary strings in the source (near the bottom of course), which are decompressed then base64'd and set as a source.
Embedding them in to the page is also partially an issue.
If you embed it in a page, you'd need to detect where it is in the page to replace the insides of the script.
But that is now a problem, the insides of that script are non-displayable.
Now you're going to have to write it in a way to insert the JS file contents before or after the script tag. That can lead to messy times.
Or you could set a DIV somewhere with the ID and constraints, then put the script call in HEAD, more markup but it works.
All of this is just simply more complicated than Flash is. And more complicated than it needs to be, too.
You do some stuff, save it as one file, it can be embedded in to any page with one EMBED / OBJECT call.
Support for embedding JS files in the same way would be nice. (I need to try this, seems like it would work)
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.
If it's another user waving the false flag of DMCA for one of their own YouTube submissions, can't they just be told to bugger off using the following section from the terms of service?:
You also hereby waive any moral rights you may have in your User Submissions and grant each user of the YouTube Website a non-exclusive license to access your User Submissions through the Website, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Website and under these Terms of Service.
Between that and fair use for critique/parody, you'd think that the DMCA could only be justified when the user has uploaded copyrighted content that didn't belong to the complainant in the first place.
FYI, ogg is a container. Like .avi and .mp4
You're talking about Theora (video) and Vorbis (audio)
Vorbis appears to be superior to everything but the most optimized AAC encoders - at least at semi low bitrates employed in streaming. Youtube sounds about like 40kbit vorbis. (really bad) But that also means they could shave almost 100kbit off their stream bandwidth by using it rather than mp3. The downside is it takes twice as long to encode.
Theora is another story. H.264 is so superior it's ridiculous - but if Google open sources VP7, there would be some real competition.
Youtube has few of the H.264 optimizations enabled, but once you crank everything to the max in x264, it's a thing of beauty. I've been experimenting with it a lot recently - it's amazing what it can do with 512kbits available.
Ogg isn't a codec. Theora is the codec here... Ogg is merely a container format, designed to be used with Theora as video and Vorbis as audio.