Slashdot Mirror
YouTube Adds 'Leanback,' Support For 4K Video
teh31337one writes with news that YouTube has announced support for 4K video, which runs at a resolution of 4096 x 3072. From their blog: "To give some perspective on the size of 4K, the ideal screen size for a 4K video is 25 feet; IMAX movies are projected through two 2k resolution projectors. ... Because 4K represents the highest quality of video available, there are a few limitations that you should be aware of. First off, video cameras that shoot in 4K aren't cheap, and projectors that show videos in 4K are typically the size of a small refrigerator. And, as we mentioned, watching these videos on YouTube will require super-fast broadband." They provided a small playlist of videos shot in 4K. This announcement comes a few days after YouTube debuted "Leanback," a service that attempts to find and serve videos you'll like based on past viewing habits, as well as offering a simplified method of browsing.
Particularly given the existence of films that are never actually filmed(ie. virtually anything Pixar has done, etc.) which make the existence of a camera that can actually handle a given resolution irrelevant to that resolution's "existence", the notion of a "highest resolution" seems rather meaningless.
This goes double for any format with lossy compression(ie. pretty much all of them in any sort of practical use), where you could declare that your format is 16,000,000x9,000,000 pixels, and thus the awesomest available, and then compress it down to 1Mb/S. The result would look roughly like the original Wolfenstein; but it would be the highest resolution out there.
I'd be far more impressed by this news, had it not been for YouTube's dismal implementation of 1080p, which in reality is only 1920x540. Yes, they effectively do 1080i, but remove one of the frames entirely.
This should prove the point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyFGDHPm-tc
It's called Blu-Ray. Expecting to see true 2K on a free streaming site is asking a lot. I just watched a 1080 video on Youtube that looked nice for streaming. Was it true 1080P, no, deal with it. It wasn't that long ago that live streaming video was a frame every 5 minutes. It was a big deal when people started streaming multiple frames a second at extreme low res. The rate of advancement is breathtaking.
I see it already, the army of Slashdotters saying "no one has the bandwidth for this" and "no one has the video hardware for this" and "YouTube's implementation of this sucks." Well, that's ok. The point is that they're pushing the limits. Remember the first time you saw any video at all on a computer? Chunky, blocky, slow, tiny video coming off a CD-ROM in the early 1990's, perhaps? Yeah, it sucked, but the point was that they were showing something that would, eventually, evolve into something useful. Without the crappy CD-ROM graphics of the early 1990's, there would be no YouTube today. Someone's got to be the first to try it, someone's got to get the technology out there so it can be improved. Wouldn't you like to eventually watch YouTube in HD directly on your television? Today you've got to jump through hoops to do that. Tomorrow it might be as effortless as watching YouTube on your desktop computer.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
It's rather irksome how effectively marketers have pushed "resolution" rather than bitrate as a metric of video quality, despite the fact that, with digital video, the latter is generally far more important than the former(except, of course, for output devices like monitors and projectors, where the number of physical pixels really does matter, and input devices like cameras, where the number of pixels matters, along with the quality of the glass, degree of compression, and a bunch of other fiddly stuff).
As 20 seconds in the image manipulation program of your choice will easily demonstrate, you can resize an image(and, by extension, a series of images) from any resolution you have to any resolution you want, subject only to the limits of your RAM and your patience.
If all video were lossless, or there were some iron law stating "though shalt allocate no less than X bits per Y pixels", comparing videos by resolution might actually matter. As it is, though, in most real world situations, the limitation is in the bitrate(unless you have a really crap monitor), and, while you can smear your too-few-Mb/s mpeg4 over as "high resolution" an output as you like, it isn't going to look any better.
James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar, etc.) says that higher frame rates are more valuable than higher resolution. He wanted to do Avatar at 48FPS, but the technology wasn't there yet. The sequel probably will be at a higher frame rate. Cameron points out that 4K resolution is worthless beyond the first few rows of the theater, but frame rate benefits all viewers.
It's a real issue for Cameron, who, as a director, likes sweeping panoramas with high detail. If you pan slowly over a high-resolution scene at 24FPS, there are visible artifacts. This precludes certain shots which look great and ought to be in the movie. It's necessary to defocus slightly or add motion blur for certain shots.
So YouTube should work on getting their frame rates up, not their resolutions. Let's see some IMAX movies at 48FPS on YouTube.
Of course you can't tell the difference; your monitor resolution means that the video is being rendered down to only a few percent over 1080p anyway, and the same will be the case for almost everyone. Support for this will cater to a niche audience for the moment, whilst also allowing for wider adoption of higher-resolution cameras, monitors and graphics cards. This is how it always is in the world of tech; we settle into a certain pattern of what we can expect our hardware to achieve, and then someone releases software (or a service, or something) that requires hardware currently on the upper bounds, slowly encouraging people to purchase it, manufacturers to lower the costs, and R&D to start working on the next high-end until eventually the cutting-edge hardware it required is mainstream.
Remember that once upon a time, 640k of RAM *really was* enough for pretty much anyone.
Little known secret: All people who use “feet” as a measuring unit, are foot fetishists. ;)
Even less known secret: All people who don’t, quietly assume it anyway. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.