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YouTube Opens Up 60fps To Everyone
jones_supa writes Four months ago YouTube promised support for 60 frames per second videos. Back then, the feature was limited to some selected demonstration clips. Now the capability to upload 60fps videos has been opened to everyone. By searching YouTube, a lot of interesting high-FPS material can already be found. For now, some caveats apply though. To watch the clips at 60fps you currently need to use Chrome (further browser support is on the way) and be sure to select 720p60 or 1080p60 from the settings menu of the video player. A fair amount of decoding power is also required, so you will need good hardware. In addition, YouTube says that the content format will be only available on "motion-intense" videos, and the average cat video may not be detected as such. Of course gaming will be the most obvious genre that can take advantage of the higher frame rate.
There are some problems with this.
1. This is not optional for videos that support it. If it was processed as 60fps video, then 1080p and 720p streams will only be served as 60fps.
2. Chrome has an outstanding crippling bug for months now in H/W decoding: https://code.google.com/p/chro... with the only viable workaround "disable HW decoding"
Those two combined together mean that 1080p60 is unwatchable on decent but not sparkling-new laptops under Windows, dropping frames / freezing constantly.
No this is Google favoring new standards before some browsers are quite ready for it. Firefox supports 60fps if the video is encoded in WebM (VP9) which only happens on Youtube if it has enough views to warrant encoding it in additional formats. Mozilla is still working on Media Source Extensions and MPEG-DASH support which is needed to play back h.264@60fps but afaik it should be in FF36 although it's not ready yet in nightly 36 builds.
Google could have added support in the Flash player but why would they put in the effort for a fairly novel feature when they are trying to replace flash with HTML5? In a few months every browser will support the HTML5 features and nobody will remember this story.
Just to add to this, 60fps works fine in Internet Explorer 11 and in Safari as well. In fact both have supported it for some time. Of the major browsers, at this point Firefox is the odd man out.
Firefox is the odd man out because they chose not to support a patent encumbered file format. Out of Microsoft, Apple, Google and Mozilla, they are the only ones to care about user freedom.
Frames are similar to each other (this is a big way that H.264 gets compression) and the more FPS you have, the more similar the frames are since each is a smaller time slice away from the last one. So you may not need a whole lot more bandwidth.
A good example is AVCHD, that's the H.264 camera format that is popular with consumer and pro cameras. The 2.0 spec supports 30fps and 60fps. At 30fps you store data at 24mbps, at 60fps you store it at 28mbps. Same visual quality, only 4mbps more to get the extra 30fps.
Same idea scales down to lower bitrates. You do need more bits to maintain the same quality, but not a ton.
Firefox is the odd man out because they chose not to support a patent encumbered file format. Out of Microsoft, Apple, Google and Mozilla, they are the only ones to care about user freedom.
Indeed, and the irony is that Firefox *is* supporting 60fps in Google's own videoformat, WebM/VP9, but Google themselves don't support this format on most of Youtube.