A look at the Zune HD Twitter app in action.
(Credit: Screenshot by Donald Bell/CNET)It has only been available for a day, but already the Zune HD's Twitter app is being updated after it was criticized by users for automatically abbreviating explicit words in users' tweets. It doesn't even give them the option of determining when or which words should be censored.
As you might expect, the Web is overflowing with unhappy users. Commenters on the Slashdot entry discussing the censors were up in arms over the feature. Quite a few of those folks echoed "rocket97's" comments, who said that the "[censors] should be an option, not a requirement." Others took the opportunity to (you guessed it) censor curse words within the comments to voice their protest.
They might have a point. Twitter itself doesn't censor any tweets that contain curse words. Even Twitter clients like TweetDeck don't censor tweets or direct messages from Twitter users.
It didn't take long for Microsoft to respond. After seeing that users were having issues with the application, Microsoft admitted that the app does indeed censor explicit tweets. It also said in an e-mailed statement to CNET News that it plans to rectify the situation soon.
"The recently released Twitter for Zune HD application has been abbreviating some explicit words in tweets when viewed on the device," a Microsoft spokesperson admitted to CNET News. "However, these explicit words do appear in their full text on the Twitter site or on any other Twitter client. We have identified the issue and are taking steps to update the application as soon as possible to ensure Twitter for Zune HD users are able to view tweets in their original state."
If you're interested in learning more about the Zune HD Twitter app, you can check out our hands-on by clicking here.
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
The Zune HD's mobile Web browser includes a search feature powered by Microsoft's Bing search engine.
(Credit: Donald Bell/CNET)Last Tuesday, I shared my positive impressions of the mobile Web browser Microsoft is including in its upcoming Zune HD portable media player. What I didn't share (not because I didn't want to) were the photos I took of the Zune HD browser in action.
The following photo gallery includes four shots of the Zune HD browser doing its thing. The first shot shows the browser in portrait mode, the second shot shows how bookmarking is handled, the third shot shows Facebook in landscape view, and the final shot demonstrates the keyboard in landscape mode.
That last shot shows off another feature Microsoft has been keeping under wraps--Bing. Yep, the Zune HD's Web browser includes a search button for instant queries using the Bing search engine. Granted, it's not an earth-shattering or completely unexpected announcement, but it's one more detail for all the Zune fans and haters to sink their teeth into.
Note: Tune in to CNET Live at noon Tuesday (August 11, 12 p.m. Pacific/3 p.m. Eastern) to watch a live episode of CNET's MP3 Insider podcast, with special guest Brian Seitz from Microsoft's Zune team and Zune Insider blog. He'll be bringing along a Zune HD and taking a few questions from the CNET Live chat room.
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A little under a year ago, Flickr began hosting video alongside its online photo service. One of its shortcomings was that it did not support high-definition video, which in the past year has become a major feature on point-and-shoot and digital SLR cameras, as well as popping up on major video-hosting services like YouTube. Video was also only available to Flickr users who were subscribed to its $25 annual professional membership.
On Monday, both of these limitations have been lifted. HD is now available to paying pro users, whose previously uploaded clips will be re-processed to fit inside the new 16:9 HD player by the end of the week. Flickr is also opening up its video feature to free users, although their HD videos will only play in the SD player.
Flickr's Pro members will be able to upload HD videos and view them in an updated 16:9 player.
(Credit: Flickr)While beautiful looking, two large limitations remain: videos must be 90 seconds or less in length and be under 150MB in size. With standard definition videos this size limit is fine, but in a 1:30-minute test clip I did on my Nikon D90, the file was well above that limit at 252MB, meaning whatever I was shooting in HD would have to be much shorter, or be compressed in a third-party piece of software before uploading. For most people, neither of these options is ideal, and Yahoo should really address them in a future update. I have the feeling many folks will simply continue to go to YouTube, Vimeo, or another service to offload that footage instead.
Along with the bump to HD, Flickr is rolling out a new feature as part of its explore section called the Flickr clock, which will let viewers browse videos by the time of day they were recorded. The company opened up a special group for video submissions back in late January, and the process involves users manually adding a special "machine tag" to their clips to let the system know when it was taken. The clock was designed by Stamen, who is also responsible for Trulia's real estate visualizations, and more famously Digg's live activity visualizations.
The new Flickr 'clock' lets you view videos by what time of day they were taken.
(Credit: Flickr)Update: There are a couple of things worth noting that we didn't know at the time of posting this. The first is that Flickr has taken off the limit of sets free users can create. The previous limit was three, so this is good news. The bad news is that free members can only upload two videos a month as part of the new rules. If you were planning to do this using Flickr's software Uploadr, you'll need a new version of it to do so. Users who upload through Flickr's Web interface need not bother.
Also, streams to the HD videos have already been made available to services using Flickr's APIs, meaning you'll soon be seeing them in third-party browsing and posting applications.
A few weeks ago TinyPic.com quietly launched support for HD video uploads. I gave it a spin earlier Thursday and the results look great. It supports files up to 200MB in size, which I'm told will get bumped up to 500MB starting next week.
The service's main appeal is that you can quickly upload and share these videos with friends, all without having to register. You can also upload an unlimited number of videos, however each one can only be up to five minutes long in length if it's in HD. SD videos, like most taken on point-and-shoot digital cameras, can be up to 15 minutes, which is five longer than YouTube allows.
Something worth mentioning is that TinyPic (which is owned by Photobucket) often serves as a test bed for upcoming Photobucket features, meaning Photobucket's video player may soon be getting an upgrade. It currently accepts HD video files, but the quality is just a hair below what's offered on TinyPic.
I've embedded my test video below. Here's the same clip on Photobucket for comparison's sake.
Original Video- More videos at TinyPic
Around this time last year we put together a comparison of various video sites to determine which ones had the best overall quality and user experience. Since then, high-definition-capable digital cameras and camcorders have taken off, and several major video hosts have rolled out official support for wide-screen, super high-quality Flash video in response. So we think the time has come to take another look at what these sites are offering now and crown a new leader in the realm of HD video.
The six sites we're putting head to head are: YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, DailyMotion, SmugMug and Blip.tv.
What's being tested
Quality. For our tests, we looked at detail on two levels--both still and in motion. For the still, we used a shot of our corner Italian restaurant. From our test footage you should be able to read everything on the front awning.
For the motion element, there were plenty of cars and pedestrians outside our offices that would have made good test subjects. In this case, we went with a bicycle since it falls somewhere in between the two.
In last year's tests, we were able to do a neat mouseover trick to show you each site's original quality from the same part of a clip. We've done that again this time, but since the videos are too wide for this page, we're only doing it with a portion of the clip. While the player size on each service was different, we viewed each video at the maximum full-screen resolution (1280 pixels wide), in order to preserve the original quality.
Value. Some of these services aren't free. So what we wanted to find out is: for those that cost money, is the charge worth it?
What's NOT being tested
Unlike the last time we did this, we're not taking upload times into account, since everyone's connection is a little different. Likewise, we're not quantifying processing times, since the clip you're uploading at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday night will probably get processed faster than the same clip at 9 a.m. on a Monday morning. We have, however, noted the respective size limits at each site, which can be incredibly important. HD video files are big, even if you're talking about a relatively short clip.
All the services we used processed our videos within about 10 minutes. The one exception was Vimeo, which took nearly three hours from the time it finished uploading to show up live on the site. This could have just been a bad time to upload, and keep in mind that paying users of Vimeo's Plus service get their videos sent to the front of the queue.
About the test footage
Click to play the sample video
To get a decent test shot, we went with a consumer-friendly, pocket-sized capture device. In this case it's the recently released Flip Mino HD (CNET review). It captures really good-looking video in 1280x720 resolution at 30 frames per second. It doesn't shoot in 1900x1080, also known as "full HD," but we're assuming that most folks are going to be using devices that shoot 720p anyway.
The footage is just a hair over three minutes long, which is about the standard for Web video, and has not been changed from its original camera formatting. It encompasses fast motion (the cars whizzing by), fine detail (local restaurant signage), and plenty of ambient sound.
You can find each version of the video at each site: Blip, DailyMotion, Facebook, SmugMug, Vimeo and YouTube.
The results
... Read more
YouTube announced Thursday that it has launched a new landing page to corral all the high-definition video uploaded to the site.
Along with the new page, YouTube's HD player now launches in a widescreen window that takes up the majority of the browser window. YouTube posted an FAQ on how to how to encode HD videos and how to avoid "windowboxing"--images that are surrounded by black bars.
The video-sharing site quietly rolled out HD-enabled videos earlier this month by adding a "watch in HD" option where the "watch in high quality" option usually appears. Last month, the site began expanding the viewable width of all videos appearing on the site, creating an image like that of a movie theater screen or high-definition television.
The site is also testing three new landing pages dedicated to the popular categories of news, movies, and music. Each page will be populated with the most popular content on the site related to that category, YouTube explained on a company blog:
The news page will be populated with breaking stories from around the world as well as news drawn from the Google News service; music will feature rising videos alongside playlists dedicated to different genres; movies will showcase some of the most popular short and full-length movies on YouTube today.
The popular "Where the Hell is Matt?" video looks stunning in HD:
(Credit:
YouTube)
Late Thursday night YouTube quietly added the option to watch videos in high definition (HD) without the need for any URL hacks. On any uploaded videos that are wider than 720 pixels, users will see a new option to "watch in HD" where the "watch in high quality" option usually appears.
In addition to the quality change in the player, YouTube has updated the embed options to let users chose one of four different sizes--all the way up to 640x505 pixels. There is still no option to embed the video in HD (officially), but you can accomplish this using the method we posted a few weeks back. Also worth noting is that there's not yet an option to automatically have the HD version play, something which you could tweak in your account settings with the introduction of higher quality clips.
As TechCrunch notes, YouTube has made no mention of the HD upgrade on its blog. Expect to see something in the next few hours. In the meantime, here's a quick still comparison of what a clip looks like in normal quality compared to HD:
The difference between normal quality (left) and HD (right) is like night and day. You'll see the new HD option on videos that were uploaded in their original quality. Click to see this in its native size.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Here's the source clip if you want to check it out for yourself.
Several readers have e-mailed me and asked for instructions on how to take their HD YouTube videos and embed them elsewhere. As I mentioned before, this isn't an officially sanctioned feature, and as such, the embed code you get on these video pages will still yield the lower-quality, non-widescreen clip.
Needless to say, this is completely unacceptable.
The good news is that you only need to make a few changes to the stock embed code get the job done. Here's what to do:
Step 1: Copy this code and paste it to wherever you intend to embed the video:
Step 2: Grab the direct link to your video. In case you've never done this before, it can be found to the right of the video player on YouTube or from your browser's address bar.
Step 3: Tweak the embed code. The finishing touch involves making a simple change to embed's URL source code to direct it to the HD version. To do this, you simply need to copy the alphanumeric gobbledygook at the end of the link you grabbed in step 2 and paste it into the part between /v/ and the & symbol in the embed code. For simplicity's sake I've labeled this "YOURVIDEOCODEHERE" in the embed code.
That's it--you're done, and all you had to do was use copy and paste twice! The end result is this:
Wired, with the help of users on the VR-Zone forums, has uncovered a simple way to get high-quality uploaded videos to display in 1280x720--also known as 720p.
YouTube has long been expected to roll out high-definition video playback, and this appears to be the first viable way to do it. The hack in question is similar to the one that was first used to toggle on the "high quality" mode. It is done simply by adding "&fmt=22" to the end of the video URL.
I got it to work without any problems on a video I uploaded earlier this morning. What's interesting here is that it was not ready at the same time the Flash version was.
In my case, it took about 15 minutes longer for the HD version to display. YouTube could be doing the second round of processing for these higher-resolution videos at the same time it's doing H.264 conversions for playback on TiVo digital video recorders and iPhones. My original upload was H.264 to begin with, so that could have sped things up.
Getting the higher-resolution video to display properly in embedded code is not so easy--but as you can see below, it works and looks gorgeous. You have to manually go in and change the embedded-link structure--something newbies might want to steer clear of. The YouTube embed technology for HD videos is missing the option to view in full screen, but you can toggle it on from the Google service's hosted video page.
One thing to note is that some folks to whom I sent this had problems getting the clip to display on older hardware. On my Intel Core2Duo machine, my CPU usage shot up from around 10 percent to 40 percent, and it peaked at 70 percent. This also happens on other HD video sites, such as Vimeo and Dailymotion. If you're using a computer equipped with a chip less powerful than an Intel Pentium 4, you might run into problems.
HD Version:
Regular version:
Live-streaming platform Justin.tv now supports high-resolution videos using H.264 encoding. The codec, which has made headway in consumer electronics, is also a great format for the Web since it can fit high resolutions in relatively small file sizes--making it ideal for something like streaming.
For now there are a few caveats that keep it from being accessible to the average user. For one, videos streamed in high resolution H.264 will not be saved into user archives, and there is no way to do it without using special software to process the stream before it hits Justin.tv's servers.
Users are encouraged to be running a rig with a fast processor and modern graphics card, as it takes some considerable horsepower to crunch down video in real time. Eventually the company hopes to offer such processing power on its own servers, so that you'll be able to get similar results with any commodity high-resolution Webcam and a good connection.
The company has posted how-to streaming guides for Windows and Mac on its blog.
