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The Internet Media Television

High-Quality YouTube Videos Coming Soon 134

Posted by Zonk from the bit-more-like-teevee dept.
mlauzon writes with the news that YouTube's co-founder Steve Chen has announced high-quality video streams are in the works for the popular site. He spoke today at the NewTeeVee Live event, discussing the challenges facing the project and when we can expect to see less grainy social videos. "The need to buffer the video before it starts playing will change the experience. Hence the experiment, rather than just a rapid rollout of this technology. On stage, he said the current resolution of YouTube videos has been "good enough" for the site until now. Chen told me he expects that high-quality YouTube videos will be available to everyone within three months. Chen also confirmed that in YouTube's internal archive, all video is stored at the native resolution in which it was sent. However, he said, a large portion of YouTube videos are pretty poor quality to begin with — 320x240. Streaming them in high-quality mode isn't going to help much."
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High-Quality YouTube Videos Coming Soon More

High-Quality YouTube Videos Coming Soon

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  • Its about time.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pablo_max ( 626328 )
    I mean honestly, stage6 has been doing this for a while. Not to mention on stage6 there is no size requirements, plus they are not so crazy on the copyright stuff.
    IMO youtube has gone downhill a bit. Seems like more often than not, a link is dead for copyright issues. :(
    Though back on topic, it will be nice to watch something on there that is still watchable at full screen.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mastershake_phd ( 1050150 )
      Though back on topic, it will be nice to watch something on there that is still watchable at full screen.

      Ya, until the tubes get clogged with all those High_Quality videos.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CSMatt ( 1175471 )
      YouTube was terrible from the very beginning. The only reason anyone puts up with the site is because it is so popular, and the only reason that it is popular is because of the media coverage of the Lazy Sunday removal. Of course, even if YouTube was genuinely good from the beginning, it would still have sunk to its current low. A popular trend with Internet sites (and everything for that matter) seems to be a decline in their overall quality, purpose, philosophy, and performance as the site in question
      • You, sir, just defined the meaning of "reactionary rant". Of course, you still failed to mention that everything used to taste much better and that politicians nowadays are nothing more than used car salesmen in suits.

      • YouTube was terrible from the very beginning. The only reason anyone puts up with the site is because it is so popular, and the only reason that it is popular is because of the media coverage of the Lazy Sunday removal.

        No: http://www.google.com/trends?q=youTube [google.com]
        That was in early 2006, and there's a bummp, barely visible, that corresponds to it on the google trends, but that was by no means a significant event overall.

        Youtube is popular because it has anything and everything. Low-quality beats not-available any day of the week.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by piojo ( 995934 )

        YouTube was terrible from the very beginning.

        Terrible for what? I've used it rarely, and mostly for educational purposes (I don't surf for funny videos), and it works great for watching short presentations, instructional videos, or other clips. It's even good for "what's the melody of that song?"

        YouTube is a hell of a lot better than the alternative that existed when it all started: uploading videos to a web server somewhere. (Nobody uploaded videos, back when you had to be a computer geek to do so.) YouTube works well enough that my computer illiter

    • In YouTube's defense, I've never heard of stage6 before. Rest assured, if it gets as popular as YouTube, they will get "crazy" on the copyright stuff. (Unless, of course, they're hosted out of country in some location where copyright stuff isn't an issue, but then, there are other issues to deal with at that point.)

      Also, the reason videos on YouTube are kind of crappy is because that's the resolution it's always supported. I mean, why upload a 100MB file at a decent native resolution if it's just going

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mikael ( 484 )
        It was one of the sites that www.tv-links.co.uk linked too. Putting aside the questionable availablity of just about every episode of every series that had ever been made, it was the most well laid out layout for viewing video-on-demand. Videos were arranged by category (drama,documentary,educational,comedy,sci-fi,fantasy,etc...) Then there was a list of titles, the seasons of each title, for each season, the name and number of that episode.

        Far, far easier to nagivate through than the current video-on-deman

  • SO how long (Score:5, Funny)

    by techpawn ( 969834 ) on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:07PM (#21383771) Journal
    Till this is applied to all the YouTube Porn knock offs?

  • Just give us back Google Video (Score:4, Insightful)

    by wiredlogic ( 135348 ) on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:10PM (#21383805)
    We really don't need HD quality streaming video. The biggest annoyance is that YouTube particuarly sucks for people running at high resolutions like 1600x1200. We can deal with the artifacts from scaled up video. Just give us the bigger window as used by Google Video for all of YouTube. It's really annoying that most of the Google Video search only goes to YouTube nowadays.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ral315 ( 741081 )
      I know it's not done by default, and it may be a bit annoying, but try clicking the button on the bottom-right of the video screen -- it makes the video full-screen.
      • The problem with that is that now it opens up in that stupid attempt at Flash fullscreen, that closes whenever you change focus to another window.

        The old behaviour was much better (opening in a new browser window, but filling it).
        • I just wish there was a good way to get full screen with it when compiz is enabled. The stable flash can do pseudo-fullscreen but won't let one use controls in flash, the newest rc works fine in terms of showing controls, but can't do fullscreen.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by empaler ( 130732 )
      I always use site:video.google.com when I need something usable through video.google.com.
      Also, I make use of their wonderful option to filter by length.
      HTH :)
    • Hmmm apple tv responsible?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )
      BetaNews [betanews.com] say this is not high definition/HD.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Or just, you know, click the fullscreen button.
    • That can't beat stage6.divx.com way of doing it.

      Just double click on the video, and you have fullscreen AND hardware-accelerated video.

      No cpu-hogging, full-of-artifacts, crappy flash video.

  • Better encoding doesn't imply better videos... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tetsujin ( 103070 ) on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:10PM (#21383807) Homepage Journal
    No matter how good the encoding is, most of what you'll see on Youtube will never be "high quality video"...

    I mean, how many inane video blog rants does the world need? How many crappy video editor projects capitalizing on some weak meme, repeating the gag (with/without stutter, slow-mo, upside-down, etc.) until it has lost any hope of being at all funny? And how many poorly-produced copycats for any given video on the site?
    • More access rarely results in more, better videos. Like anything else, a few good ones rise to the top. Fortunately, we don't have to watch the crappy ones.
    • Wow, I didn't realise YouTube was so varied. I thought it was just for videos of kittens doing amusing or cute things.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by triso ( 67491 )

        Wow, I didn't realise YouTube was so varied. I thought it was just for videos of kittens doing amusing or cute things.
        Kittens that look like Hitler?

    • Meh, it's still better than television.

    • Whoa... the irony of your post nearly overwhelmed me there. Let me see if I can fight through it...

      Your post ranting against poor quality user created content is itself user created content - and rather poor content at that!

      So what you really need to ask yourself, then, is how many narrow minded Slashdot comments does the world need? Clearly, you felt that that the answer to that question was at least one more!

      Obviously, 90 % of Youtube content is crap. That's also true for professionally made cont

    • And how many poorly-produced copycats for any given video on the site?

      42.

    • The beauty of the internet though, is that you don't have to watch it! Amazing!

  • To bad (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:10PM (#21383809)
    To bad they are only talking about resolution.

  • Youtube Have Been Trailing for a long time (Score:3, Insightful)

    by illectro ( 697914 ) on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:11PM (#21383811)
    The fact that they were so big meant people still used them even though every other site offered better quality. And the people running other sites had to deal with the fact that the content partners that understood youtube would ship them youtube quality videos, regardless of the site in question. now if only youtube would let you upload mp3's directly like imeem.com [imeem.com] they might get me insterested.

  • High quality video content... (Score:5, Funny)

    by pheared ( 446683 ) <[ten.deraehp] [ta] [nivek]> on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:11PM (#21383815) Homepage
    ...still in development.

  • Questions.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by PhantomHarlock ( 189617 ) on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:11PM (#21383819)
    The big question is, will you need to pay to share your videos at higher quality, or will that be free? Also, are they talking about a higher resolution and higher data rate, or just higher data rate? It would be nice to move up to 400X300 or 640X480, but that seems unlikely. At least they can do away with the artifical scaling they're doing now on playback, which is really horrible.

    Currently, the only good outlet I've found for high quality video sharing is vuze.com. I currently upload videos to both YouTube and Vuze, since with Vuze you have to install the torrent client, etc. The upside is full HD videos.

    I find it very interesting to note that the videos you upload are stored in the original format. A lot of people are probably kicking themselves right now for not uploading them at a higher quality, although lately I've been sending them high quality files so that when they are recompressed you're not adding crud on top of crud. However I've never sent them anything higher resolution than 320X240. Might have to re-up some stuff if they decide to kick the resolution higher than that.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by garcia ( 6573 )
      The big question for me is whether or not they will raise the video length limit for standard uploads. I take plenty of my own video and put it on YouTube but I have to constantly remember the small file size (100MB) and video length (10 minutes) when I'm taping...

      I don't care as much what the resolution is, but it would be nice to have those limits raised.
      • That would be nice as well. People upload longer videos anyway, they just split them up and it's real annoying to have to deal with that. I think they're trying to prevent lots of people uploading full length programs. Hollyweird probably likes that too since that makes it harder to upload full length TV shows. Not that I'd want to watch anything of value at such crap resolution, and honestly, for more than 10 minutes at a stretch. ;) But introduce higher quality, and I think longer format programs w

      • Is there some special reason you continue to use YouTube if the constraints bother you? There are a ton of other sites that have different constraints, and if you're just sending links to friends it shouldn't matter which site you use.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by garcia ( 6573 )
          Is there some special reason you continue to use YouTube if the constraints bother you? There are a ton of other sites that have different constraints, and if you're just sending links to friends it shouldn't matter which site you use.

          Yeah, because I want people to find my videos and the vast majority of the Internet population uses YouTube.

          • Yeah, because I want people to find my videos and the vast majority of the Internet population uses YouTube.

            Does YouTube actually help you accomplish that goal, or does the vast volume of videos posted to the sight distract people from ever finding your stuff? Actually a more interesting question is this: Does anyone actually ever find your videos by just searching around YouTube itself?

            It seems to be that you'd be better off getting in on the "blog with embedded videos" thing than just getting lost in th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pla ( 258480 )
      A lot of people are probably kicking themselves right now for not uploading them at a higher quality

      Why? What (little) I've uploaded, I encoded at 320x240 at the highest quality possible with their size restriction. I don't regret optimizing it for quality under a known set of limitations, just because of the possiblity that someday they might raise the limits a tad.


      lately I've been sending them high quality files so that when they are recompressed you're not adding crud on top of crud

      I had the i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Skapare ( 16644 )

      I'm hoping for 1920 x 1200 progressive at 75 fps ... because my monitor can handle it :-)

      I guess that's not going to be 3 months away :-(

    • At least they can do away with the artifical scaling they're doing now on playback, which is really horrible.

      As opposed to real scaling? I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Are they faking the scaling or something? Making you think it has been scaled via hypnosis, when it is actually playing at the original size?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tknd ( 979052 )

      It's not really a question. The answer is whether you pay or not, as long as they get within 480p quality, it will almost certainly mean the beginning of the death of things like network/cable TV and TIVO. With the possibility of higher quality video, why would I need cable TV service or a TIVO when I can just download and view the content on demand?

      If you want a case study look no further than anime fansubs and bittorrent--some anime reaches the rest of the world fully subtitled within 24 hours of the

  • High quality youtube videos are already here! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Silverlancer ( 786390 ) on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:13PM (#21383827)
    See this link [videohelp.com] for a guide, and any of my recent uploads [youtube.com] for an example. For a really extreme example that demonstrates how terribly inefficient the Flash H.263 decoder is, see this 720p 8megabit clip of Transformers [youtube.com]. Its quite possible already.

    Of course, on a serious note, I welcome the ability to upload high quality videos without relying on absurdly high bitrates to compensate for H.263's crappiness.
    • Yes, that tutorial makes we want to do that for every single video I upload. :) I had heard that was possible, but holy moly.
    • Hey DS, nice to see you on /. too!

      With lots of love, an ex signature snipper.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by KuNgFo0 ( 519426 )
      I think this may be a lot more appealing if it takes advantage of the h.264 support in the upcoming version of Flash Player [adobe.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suv4x4 ( 956391 )
      how terribly inefficient the Flash H.263 decoder is

      You know, H.263 is the 1-st gen codec in Flash. Flash has supported On2 VP6 for years now, and now supports MPEG4/AAC streams too.

      Not to blame Flash for this, but YoutTube.
      • Of course, I know Flash supports VP6; what I was saying is that the Flash H.263 decoder is really really slow; it lags on a 720p video even though H.263 is a comparatively simple standard to decode.

  • In other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by moogied ( 1175879 ) on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:13PM (#21383839)
    The internet was found dead in its apartment today. Appearently from a broken back. A short statured man was found near the crime scene trying to limp home. Upon being arrested by ICANN the man was heard screaming "but YOU TUBE! YOU TUBE! I KNOW YOU TUBE!"

    It is survived by ARPANET, and SneakerNET. As well as PigeonNET

    • We should move all high-bandwidth content delivery systems over to P2P.

      Couple with decentralized storage that copy popular content close to demand so you can pull more content off your general area instead of halfway across the globe.

      Word of mouth still links into geographical location. Most of my firends live in the same region as me, even if I use email to tell them about the lastest news.

      If a million people in Mongolia suddenly decides to watch Turbonegro's latest HD music video? Pushing HD over there sh

  • Proviso (Score:5, Funny)

    by Shadow Wrought ( 586631 ) * <shadow.wrought@g ... minus herbivore> on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:14PM (#21383847) Homepage Journal
    "High-Quality Video" refers only to the medium, not the content.

    That is all.

  • On a dial-up I can barely download youtube at the moment. With higher res my puny bandwidth will be insufficient. As is most of this stuff is binary and doesn't compress.

  • Reason for low res submissions (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Xzzy ( 111297 ) <sether@@@tru7h...org> on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:19PM (#21383915) Homepage
    "However, he said, a large portion of YouTube videos are pretty poor quality to begin with -- 320x240. Streaming them in high-quality mode isn't going to help much"

    I would think a lot of this has to do with the fact that it's a pretty common trick to get decent quality with the existing youtube.. resize your video to 320x240 at the highest bitrate that will keep you below 100 megs. The logic is if you reduce the amount of reprocessing that's necessary, fewer artifacts appear.
    • Yea. They're only poor quality because people were only trying to surpass their current playback rate. If they had said before the original video was being stored, people would have run higher data rates and resolutions. Sigh.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      When I read their instructions on how to upload videos some time ago, it suggested resizing to that size.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Get_Plover ( 78671 )
      i work for a content promotions company, gochongo [gochongo.com] ( all forms of content, not just video ), and we see a *lot* of video submissions at resolutions of 320x240 or below. every now and then someone will submit something NOT from their cell phone and one can really tell a qualitative difference. since cell phones and cams and the whole shebang are always improving youtube will have to improve their video quality if they don't want to become known ( even more ) as the source for low quality vids.
  • For the majority of videos that I watch, anyway, I'm not concerned about video quality (unless it's unbearably bad).

    YouTube started because people wanted to share their independently made videos. With the recent news of Opera/other high-profile media stars, more blingbling style stuff, etc... it seems YT is losing sight of what their community built them up to be.

  • I'd rather just have better sound. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Entropius ( 188861 ) on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:30PM (#21384029)
    Higher sound quality wouldn't be that hard to implement: Vorbis can get very near transparency at 80 kbps, and 60 kbps Vorbis isn't bad.

    For people who watch music-type stuff on Youtube and care about things sounding nice, a better audio stream would be a welcome change.

    • For people who watch music-type stuff on Youtube and care about things sounding nice

      While I agree that the quality of the audio should go up, methinks the intersection of those two groups of people is fairly small.
      • There are a lot of classical or quasi-classical music videos on YouTube, and classical music listeners tend to be a fairly picky bunch.

  • Building for the future? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jacobcaz ( 91509 ) on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:33PM (#21384055) Homepage
    I was going to make a crack - like everyone else - about how there is still not "high quality" video (content) on YouTube. But then I thought, if the technology is put in place someone will eventually fill the void.

    I was really into video production back in the mid 90s. At that time I was all VHS and used a Video Toaster - I thought it was hot shit, but there was so much I couldn't do like frame-accurate editing, 3D animation, etc.

    In about 1996 I participated in a consumer survey on video products. They group I was with kept looking at me funny because I wanted frame-accurate control, higher-quality, not affected by copying (multiple generations) all in consumer equipment. Even I thought it was a pipe-dream - that kind of control was WAAAAY out of the hands of a hobbyist.

    But when I finally got my hands on my first MiniDV camera, hooked to my computer via Firewire, it was that huge leap forward that I would have NEVER dreamed about in 1996. All of a sudden I had a medium that was frame-accurate, didn't suffer from multiple generations, and was much higher quality than VHS, allowed frame-level edits/graphic control. How cool!

    Now there are even movies out shot on MiniDV and it's variants. That would have been impossible to do with anywhere near the same level of quality - on consumer (!) equipment - in the mid-90s.

    Once the technology is in place, content will eventually be created to fill the void. We just have to give it more time.
    • In a sense, "serious amateur" videography is probably further behind than it would be solely judged by the current level of technology. Reason being that until recently, the equipment sold at consumer prices was nowhere near good enough to give professional results. Sure, camcorders were around, but the vast majority were more like point-and-shoot cameras- both in terms of the quality of the results and the level of control.

      Contrast this with photography, where for many years even a bottom-of-the-range SL
  • ...if this means they will be sending substantially more data. You know, we wouldn't want to hurt Comcast's poor, fragile, overworked network, would we, Snookums?

    Fascinating. Your ISP complaing necause you are USING the bandwidth they SOLD to you.

    Sorry, it's easy to rant about this, even if it is pointless. And I'm not even a Comcast customer. Guess I want my ISP (Cox) to avoid this in the future...
    • I hate Cox with all the passion my shriveled heart can muster. I moved cities, bought the same connection for the same price from Cox that I had from Comcast. Cos has easily half the speed or less.
  • So what's the procedure for uploading now? I remember it used to be something along the lines of... 1.) Upload your video. 2.) Wait 30 minutes for a person to record your video to VHS, piss on it, drop kick it, reassemble it and reupload it. 3.) ... 4.) Profit? But seriously, I can't stand the unsightly quality of YouTube videos. Most of my friends just kinda tilt their heads, but whenever I need to watch a fan-made (good quality) music video, Stage6 or direct download of the original AVI are the only o

  • Upscaling Video (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Friday November 16, 2007 @05:52PM (#21384251) Homepage Journal
    Video can be upscaled to higher resolution much better than can photos, because video has more info in it. When a feature smaller than a sampled pixel moves across several pixels, it doesn't affect the all pixels the same way. The sampling grid can be "deconvolved" (or otherwise factored out) to a great extent, relying on the relative consistency of objects' appearance across brief intervals and short distances.

    Google's got the money and PhDs to make that work. I'd love to see them drag the archive of lorez movies into a hirez platform.
    • It also takes craploads of computing power to do though, which means more expensive hardware. I know Google has many servers, but they don't buy servers for fun... upconverting video at the rate it is being uploaded to YouTube at would be an insane task.
      • There's probably a subset of video that's popular enough to be worth upconverting.

        But Google already harnesses lots of distributed computing power: nearly all of the CPU cycles consumed in playing their videos is consumed on the viewing user's PC. Which uses a Google Flash applet to play it back. Google could include in that applet extra code which chews away at some of their archived video. Which could in turn become a way for Google to expand its crunching power to other tasks, like indexing. I'd toggle a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )
      It also takes a crapload of processing power and is suiceptable to optical illusions which can actually make the quality worse. Basicly, trying to put back information that isn't there anymore is usually a lost cause, and most other restoration work rely on Mark I eyeballs to tweak the settings until the computer "gets it". Hardly anything worth doing on youtube content.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 4D6963 ( 933028 )

      It only works if the video is sufficiently aliased tho, because if the video contains no aliasing (that is, properly filtered so that no frequency components high than half the Nyquist frequency are aliased back under half the Nyquist frequency) then you can't do that, can you?

      • Perhaps, but video like that would look like an Atari 2600 game, with real object lighting converted to always color every pixel into which it was sampled exactly the same. A rectangular dot moving around the screen, except for the tiniest variations in natural lighting at very small/brief scales of timespace.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 4D6963 ( 933028 )

          OK sorry maybe it's because I'm tired but I completely fail to understand what you said.

          Perhaps, but video like that would look like an Atari 2600 game

          Video like that, you mean, a video with no aliasing as I described??

          with real object lighting converted to always color every pixel into which it was sampled exactly the same.

          Errr.. what?

          A rectangular dot moving around the screen, except for the tiniest variations in natural lighting at very small/brief scales of timespace.

          I didn't get that one either..

  • We use youtube for sharing clips of our son with friends and family (and anyone else who cares to see our corgi digging a hole on the beach and the my son falling in trying to "help").

    Using Adobe Premiere CS (or other tools) to pre-scale the videos to "youtube quality" gives us MUCH better results than uploading the original quality (which is 720x576p) and letting youtube resize it. It also (obviously) allows us to upload longer videos.

    The case of "not many high quality originals" is a chicken and egg issu

  • High Quality? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by MSTCrow5429 ( 642744 )
    Oh, mean the resolution, not the content.
  • I've always wished youtube would enable video smoothing during playback to help cancel out some of the pixelation. Its as simple as setting smoothing = true on the flash video display object, yet it makes a world of diferenece in terms of quality. The videos are also small enough that it wouldn't be a big hit on cpus. AS1/2: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/8/main/00002842.html [adobe.com] AS3: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/media/Video.html [adobe.com]

  • About a year or two I was attempting to upload HD quality video to GVideo and was severely disappointed with their compression quality. I had to re-export my videos at a lower quality, and those ended up being a little better (but still not great).

    The kicker was I had a 90 minute compilation of my videos that came up to several Gigs in the standard HD format, but around 500 MB in the lower quality export that I tried to send to Google. After several iterations through their upload software, I have never

  • 3 months? (Score:4, Funny)

    by bigdavex ( 155746 ) on Friday November 16, 2007 @06:48PM (#21384837)

    Chen told me he expects that high-quality YouTube videos will be available to everyone within three months.

    I think after about 2 months I'd say, "Screw it, I'm sick of staring at this 'buffering' animation."
  • That's good but who is going to upload it? Most people are stuck with ADSL or cable that has good download speeds but crappy upload rates. Companies seem to think that in the Web 2.0 it is ok to sell access with 256kbps upstream. Ridiculous. TCP/IP is designed to work within synchronous (same down/upload) connections, so selling asynchronous connections makes absolutely no sense.
    • This is probably the most aggrivating thing about American consumer DSL and cable connections.

      The internet was never designed to be a one way street.

      • At least we aren't stuck with satellite Internet access, where we use a (unidirectional) dish to communicate with a satellite. Some people far out of the reach of urban centers are stuck with that. Though some have the option to use dial-up as the terrestrial return, it's limited to 33k or so, since not even dial-up is synchronous. Also, the option to have satellite return in addition to the downstream link is very expensive, and still slow.

        A friend of mine said that upload is expensive, and he didn't e

  • The thing that drives me nuts with YouTube is their fixed movie radio (4:3).

    There's so much good content in 16:9 but encoded in 4:3 by YouTube.

    When I watch full screen on my 16:9 monitor, I have 1.5" of black bars all around the movie. :-(

    YouTube gurus, please fix that!

    • The thing that drives me nuts with YouTube is their fixed movie radio (4:3).
      There's so much good content in 16:9 but encoded in 4:3 by YouTube.
      When I watch full screen on my 16:9 monitor, I have 1.5" of black bars all around the movie. :-(

      When I encounter YouTube videos that are the wrong aspect ratio, I just download it and then play it back with mplayer with the "-aspect 16:9" option. This also works for videos that I want to replay slowly if the movement is too fast to be caught (e.g. cool CGI effects).

  • .....That all the little emo fucktards will now look 'REALLY SAD'? Just what we need, hi-def whining

  • Err... No he didn't? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by johnnywheeze ( 792148 ) on Friday November 16, 2007 @08:27PM (#21385735)
    I was at that conference, and while the question about high-quality video was asked, Chen pretty much said they were happy with the quality of online video they had, and were much more focused on the reach of YouTube, keeping the files small so that everyone could watch them, even those without a lot of bandwidth and in other countries.
    He certainly didn't say anything about a high quality YouTube in the next three months. I think this blogger read more into the talk than what Chen said. However he implies that he talked to him directly, so I can only vouch for what was said at the conference.
  • When you consider that a lot of YouTube videos are loading really slowly across the UK (yes, I have tested this).

    While this is a good idea in the future, I think first priority should be ensuring that ALL videos load at an acceptable speed. 4kbps is not an acceptable speed.
  • relive all the glorious awkwardness of the teenage years in high res. I've always wanted to experience low brow home video complete with more prominent acne, shinier braces and burgeoning facial fuzz. Is it possible that people will post less once the skin enhancing blur of low quality is taken away and their imperfections become more glaring?
  • The AppleTV already gets pretty high quality video from youtube. I wonder if they are adapting that for the masses.

    Find a friend with an appletv or an Apple store and check it out!

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