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November 14, 2007 6:57 PM PST

High-quality YouTube videos coming soon

by Rafe Needleman
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YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference today, confirmed that high-quality YouTube video streams are coming soon. Although YouTube's goal, he said, is to make the site's vast library of content available to everyone, and that requires a fairly low-bitrate stream, the service is testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer's Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if viewers want it.

Why wouldn't they? Because 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 untill 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.

Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.
Add a Comment (Log in or register) Showing 1 of 3 pages (65 Comments)
by Intelman November 15, 2007 1:46 PM PST
Youtube needs to drop flash, it is buggy at best, when my browser crashes, flash is usually to blame. Maybe they should try out Microsoft's silverlight, it works on Macs, Windows, and even Linux.....
Reply to this comment
by returnofajedi November 15, 2007 3:44 PM PST
...or you could quit using IE and join the rest of us on Firefox.
by capty99 November 15, 2007 5:57 PM PST
Google (youtube) is not going to support a microsoft architecture that is trying to compete for such a big piece of the pie as flash controls. not gonna happen
by menotbug November 16, 2007 3:05 PM PST
Flash is currently the ONLY usable solution for in-browser video. I'm all for web standards (and therefore any proprietary Microsoft crap is out of the question anyway) but as much as one may hate it for its opacity, currently there's no way around Flash because it works across clients, and most people have it installed. It does have bugs, but fewer than any other video plugin. The latest Flash beta supports mp4/AVC/AAC which is the upcoming standard, so I'm pretty sure everybody will be using Flash until in a couple of years HTML5 <video> is standardized and implemented across browsers.
by trongod2000 November 17, 2007 10:15 PM PST
YouTube limits sumissions to 100meg so there is not much opportunity for the average user to upload anything near high quality video unless they limit the recording to about 15 seconds.
They seriously need to change the limitations they place on the people who try to make youtube a great site
Reply to this comment
by allyduan December 3, 2008 7:22 PM PST
Converting your high quality videos into flv before uploading, it can reduce the size a lot.

I know a tool to do this: Wondershare Video to Flash Encoder.

http://www.flash-on-tv.com/video-to-flash.html#124
by emersk November 24, 2007 12:47 PM PST
C'EST WHA????!!!!
"Chen also confirmed that in YouTube's internal archive, all video is stored at the native resolution in which it was sent"

This means that everyone has been fooled into uploading at 320X240 instead of 640X480 which results in passable quality. If we now replace out videos with higher resolution versions then we lose our viewer counts. No one knew that in only 3 months videos uploaded at 640X480 would look so much better.
Reply to this comment
by cinetech March 23, 2008 3:28 AM PDT
YouTube is encoding and displaying higher quality videos. Read this article to get the scoop.

http://www.squidoo.com/youtubehd
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by bmirabito August 3, 2008 10:03 PM PDT
As many have noticed by now, YouTube has been tweaking it's compression techniques lately to create both "standard" and "high quality" versions of file uploads. They now recommend uploading files in MP4 format using a larger video size. YouTube's changes have made lots of trouble for content producers. Proven tools and tutorials that were "standard operating procedure" have been rendered obsolete. There is evidence of this in blog posts all over the web.

Over the last few days, I have been trying to find a suitable and simple workaround. I think I discovered one. Be warned -- this fix may be temporary if YouTube continues to "enhance" its compression techniques. But as of 04-AUG-2008, the process simple and works just fine for me.

My commercial software has become virtually useless at the final stage of production just before upload. But I found a freeware tool called WinFF (http://www.winff.org) that works and makes the last stage fairly straightforward.

As YouTube now suggests, you want to convert your high quality video to MP4. This is where WinFF shines. First, open your high quality video in WinFF and select 'Options' to adjust the conversion settings as follows:

Convert to: MP4 > H.264 in MP4(4:3)
Video Bitrate: 2000
Frame Rate: 30
Video Size: 640x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Audio Bitrate: 64
Sample Rate: 22050
AC: 1
2 Pass: selected
Deinterlace: selected

SIDE NOTE: If you create videos often, you may take the OPTIONAL step to make a "Preset" in WinFF. If you only occasionally create YouTube videos, there is no need. The XML params you would use for a "YouTube preset" are -r 30.00 -vcodec libx264 -s 640x480 -aspect 4:3 -b 2000k -acodec libfaac -ab 64k -ar 22050 -ac 1 -deinterlace -pass 2

Now with these settings, convert the file. A 10 minute MP4 file may become larger than YouTube's 100 MB limit. Don't panic. There's an easy way around the limit. Just use the YouTube multifile upload tool at http://www.youtube.com/my_videos_multiupload and the file size cap is raised to 1 GB each.

If you use WinFF with these settings, the MP4 file that is produced will look great in YouTube's "high quality" mode, and still very good in "standard" mode.

Hope this helps,

Bill M
http://www.sunfitters.com
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by youtubelin September 7, 2008 6:25 AM PDT
thank you vey much
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Reply to this comment
by AquariZ September 30, 2008 3:30 AM PDT
ive done what you said, but its been converting for like 2 hours now, how will i know when its done? & when i try to play the file, it says, "its not a file quicktime understands"
do you have a link to the right codec to see a mp4 type of file? also, in the drop down menu, for options, i didnt have the MP4 selection, so i chose H.264 High quality 4:3, please help!
Reply to this comment
by AquariZ September 30, 2008 3:30 AM PDT
that comment was to bmirabito
Reply to this comment
by YouTubeHQ October 1, 2008 12:58 PM PDT
I was having trouble working out how to watch, create and embed high quality video in Youtube. I found out the easiest ways and have recently put up a website that explains it all. Totally free. I have even included a script that generates the high quality embed code for you with different options. So it's even easier.

Its 100% free and I'm trying to help the guys that don't know and make it easier for the guys that do. Thanks,
Mark
http://www.youtubehq.info
Reply to this comment
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by youtubelin October 16, 2008 6:27 AM PDT
thank you
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