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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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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.
How about they fix the bloated, slow-to-load youtube.com homepage and replace it with something clean and simple like the Google homepage?
What do you mean? I'm watching youtube on my open source OS right now.
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.