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.
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:
Right now I think the No. 1 thing worth watching on Hulu is the stellar Season 2 premiere of AMC's Mad Men--regrettably, the NBC-News Corp. joint venture hasn't been able to secure the rights to any other episodes of the ad-industry drama.
But there's more that's new on Hulu, the company said in an e-mail statement Tuesday. It's revamping its high-definition offerings in a new release of its "HD Gallery" section, with episodes of current NBC shows like 24, 30 Rock, Heroes, and The Office. As part of a special promotion, they're temporarily ad-free.
It's the first time the site has offered full-length TV shows in the 720p format, the statement explained. But it's important to keep in mind that not all hi-def Web video is created equal.
If you're among the majority of Americans, you probably aren't watching high-definition on your television yet. But come Monday, you may start to see HD commercials on your PC.
San Francisco-based BrightRoll is offering advertisers the ability to run large-format, high-quality video ads across its network of Web site publishers.
The ads initially appear as banner ads on the page. When a user click on one, a large separate window opens up on top of the Web page.
There are trade-offs for serving up high-definition video in terms of time it takes for them to load, but these ads seem to load pretty fast, according to Bobby Tulsiani, a consumer video analyst at Jupiter Research.
"The critical thing is that it doesn't get in the way of the user experience," he says. "For advertisers, the higher quality matters for the brand recognition, especially ads showing off a car, or travel ads in which the scenery is important."
There's been a lot of progress in the world of high definition in the last few days. HD DVD has fallen, and just yesterday, video host Dailymotion rolled out its new HD player. While every visitor of the site with a fast broadband connection has access to the new HD player, only two types of content providers can actually upload HD content to it. The first are the official content providers like movie studios and TV networks. The second, are motionmakers--Dailymotion's equivalent of YouTube's director program. Anyone can become a motionmaker; they just need to state what type of content they're going to be producing, and as a reward get unlimited file size and length.
The HD video in question is 720p, which looks absolutely fantastic when watched in its native resolution. HD videos can be embedded on third-party sites and will play in HD as long as the viewer has a good connection. Otherwise they'll simply play at a dialed-down quality.
I've embedded one below. If it's in HD, the little HD logo in to bottom will be lit up yellow, otherwise you're watching the lower quality version. Be sure to view it in full screen to see the details.
Related: YouTube sucks: 4 sites that do it better and Vimeo's going hi-def next week
Adobe Systems intends to add support for a video compression standard that will bring high-definition video to Flash-based streaming content on the Web.
The company on Tuesday announced the release of a beta version of its Flash Player, code-named Moviestar, that adds support for H.264, the video compression portion of the MPEG 4 standard.
The new features will be made available in the fall as part of an update to Flash Player 9.
Support for the H.264 standard will lead to more Web video content being available in high definition, Randall said. He said Adobe chose to support the standard now because it is being adopted more by content producers and media distributors like cable companies. It also used in DVD formats Blu-Ray and Hi-DVD.
Flash is a de facto standard for streaming video used by YouTube and other high-volume Web sites.
But Microsoft is challenging Flash's dominance in Web video with Silverlight. Microsoft has signed on large video publishers to use Silverlight, including MLB.com.
Silverlight supports Windows Media Audio and Video and another video compression standard based on Windows Media called VC-1. Microsoft has not announced plans to support H.264, but a representative said the company could add support based on customer feedback.
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