YouTube has nearly mastered the whole concept of video sharing in its current form, so the next step is to improve what they have to offer something even better. There’s always room for improvement no matter what you’re doing! The obvious improvement for YouTube would be to offer high-quality videos which according co-founder Steve Chen, we should see within three months. This announcement was made at the NewTeeVee conference that was held on Wednesday where Om Malik and Liz Gannes sat down to chat with him. I know what most of you are thinking… “hooray!” or “finally!” It’s about time, isn’t it? Some sites are reporting that YouTube will be offering HD content, but according to Liz Gannes there was no mention of HD whatsoever.
Most people upload videos where the quality is much better than what YouTube can support right now. YouTube down-grades the quality of videos and converts them to Flash, no matter what format they were uploaded in. As broadband Internet makes its way into more homes, there’s no reason why they couldn’t up the quality so that viewers have a better experience. The only downside is that with a higher quality video, high buffer times could potentially drive people away if they had a slow connection. Not to worry — YouTube knows this which is why they say they’re working on a player that would detect a user’s Internet connection to determine if they could be served a higher-quality video.
So, get ready for a better viewing experience with a new player over at YouTube. 3 months to go and counting…
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Tags: Web Sites, Videos, YouTube
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This has been in the works for a long time - its actually tied to Adobe’s new beta of Flash Player 9, which has the H.264 support needed to make HD streaming palatable as far as server storage, streaming performance, bulk and bandwidth usage.
The only downside is that it generally takes significantly longer to transcode efficient H.264 then it does more current codecs, so they will have to beef up their transcoding farms a bit.
I transcode everything into iPod-compatible 640x H.264 - it plays on everything - iPod, TiVo, XBox, my Archos, PC, Mac - and a DVD will fit in about 1.5 GB and looks great on my widescreen.
If you want to ditch iPod support (iPod can only handle low-complexity H.264 ), you can get a DVD in under 800MB.
This was definitely a necessity for YouTube. Many of their competitors do this already, so its good to see they are making an effort to keep up.
Finally….
Or they will just make it take longer to transcode those videos. I’m guessing as it stands right now they already have an impressive server farm, but hopefully they do add to it so that the performance and transcoding time isn’t ungodly.