YouTube launches HD video page

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)

[PhaseDMA]

Their idea of HD at least on the random video I landed on leaves a lot to be desired. I can't remember what the video was of, but I believe it was a music video. Complete garbage. It was actually below par of some low quality videos on YouTube.

Of course I suppose the issue was the uploader and not YouTube.

[PhaseDMA]

Also while Where the Hell is Matt does look awesome this video does a much better job of showing the massive difference - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfWXRybZS4A

[deepen05]

its about time they went HD. i have been waiting for this for a couple of years now. its great and youtube is better than ever!!!

[venmo]

its so great.i waited this for a very long time.