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.

Comments

not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[Surt]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Hi-Vision

4k video is so legacy.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:not the highest resolution: 8k super hi-vision

[AAWood]

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.

Yay HD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I can enjoy horse porn in glorious 4096 x 3072!

How about less compression?

[Beardydog]

I just tried a couple seconds at 1080p, and a couple of seconds at 4k on a 1080p screen, and found the difference to be quite noticeable in the details. The downside was that my 8800GT can't actually play 4k video faster than 4fps. How about instead of a 4k option almost no one will use, we try a 1080p option that doesn't have massive blocks, fringes, and blurring.

Re:How about less compression?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:4K?? They can't even do 1080p yet

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Stop the hatin'

[IGnatius T Foobar]

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.

Re:Stop the hatin'

[Kev Vance]

Thank you! Reading page after page of complaints about this was disheartening. Not everyone has lost their sense of imagination.

Framerate, not resolution

[Animats]

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.

Oh dear

[Quiet_Desperation]

And a million internet tubes cried out in pain.

"Holy fuck! How many pixels by how many! What? HOW MANY? WTF? o_O We're gonna need a bigger pipe!"

Re:cool but...

[should_be_linear]

I watched it and now am impressed! 1080p suddenly looks like RCA Studio 2 console, with giant pixels.

It's the highest in actual use

[Sycraft-fu]

SHV is experimental tech. They are playing with it right now, but it isn't in use anywhere, even in the pro world. It is just proof of concept and early testing.

4k is the high end of cinema. 4k is normally what you scan in and process film at (it is considered to be about the same as good 35mm). You can also get monitors that are very nearly 4k, and the high end digital cinema projectors are 4k. It is a currently used and in production format. If you go to a new, spiffy, digital theater and watch a movie like Avatar, it is probably a 4k projector (though some places with smaller screens use 2k instead, which is just a bit higher than 1080p).

There's a difference between "Technology that is being developed," and "Technology that is being used."

Take Ethernet. 100gb is currently under development. There are test units that exist, and the standard was finalized last month. However it is not a deployed technology. Your network does not have 100gb Ethernet backbones. 10gb is currently the fastest Ethernet out there. It is the fastest deployed in actual networks right now (fastest Ethernet, I know there are faster POS lines and so on).

So it is accurate to say 4k video is the highest for now.

Re:Metricate your shit already, America!

[Hurricane78]

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. ^^

IMAX is NOT 2K

[hamiltondaniel]

Whoever wrote this does not know anything about IMAX. IMAX is not projected digitally, let alone with a 2K digital projector.

35mm film is about equal, or a little better than, 4K digital in terms of resolution. Most all of the time when you go see a movie these days, it is still being projected on 35mm film. It's cheaper than a digital projector and looks better. When you went and saw Avatar in 3D it was being projected in 2K (for almost everyone) digital and that's why you could see the pixels on the screen. 2K is NOT good enough for anything but very small movie screens. Anyone who says it is is not a cinematographer (I am) and has never used both a 35mm film camera and the best digital cinema cameras (I have), and probably doesn't know what a cinematographer even really is. 99% of all big-budget films are still shot on 35mm film because it is simply the third-best image-capturing method out there, better than ANY digital camera in existence today. It is also much more expensive, but on large films the price of film is a drop in the bucket compared to everything else.

The second best cinema image-capturing method out there is 65/70mm film.

The best is IMAX.

IMAX is 65/70mm film travelling through the camera horizontally; each frame is about 2.75 by 2 inches. That is enormous. It's like a medium-format still camera...except 24 times a second. Here's a comparison of IMAX to regular 35mm film (most digital cinema cameras have sensors, by the way, about exactly the same size as a 35mm film camera): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Imaxcomparison.png

IMAX is NOT projected on 2K. "Digital IMAX" is. Digital IMAX is pretty much useless and is not even as good as standard 35mm film projection; it uses two 2K projectors overlapping each other to give a slightly higher than 2K theoretical resolution to the image; for those of you with still cameras, 2K is about equal in resolution to a 6- or 7-megapixel camera. Congratulations. Your $1000 SLR has way more resolution than a digital cinema projector that costs a half million dollars.

Real IMAX, i.e. horizontal 65/70mm film, has an estimated resolution of about 104 million pixels; you would need a 12K x 9K digital sensor to even come close to the resolution of IMAX. No one makes those and no one will for a long time, if ever. The highest-resolution digital photographic sensors outside of the military are probably Hasselblad digital medium format backs; they are about 60 megapixels, or half the resolution of IMAX film, and they are still cameras capable of only about one frame a second.

IMAX is not 2K. Digital IMAX is not IMAX.

IMAX is film. Film is incredible.