YouTube Now (unofficially) Supports 1080P

Michael B. McGee said:
let me get this straight. you can only view a 1080P clip/video as a link/URL? so, if i were to upload a 1080P video to YT, I would only be able to view it in 1080P as a link emailed to whomever. i wouldn't be able to see it in 1080P directly from YT? am i wrong?
Click to expand...

anybody???? and/or how long after loading a 1080P video are you able to view it in 1080P or 720P instead of the plain old "HD" quality?
 
The format of your source file is being kept all the time. If you upload an 1080p file it will become available a couple of minutes after the 720p version has become available.

Deti
 
thanks, i think i was having a common problem of not being able to see the 720/1080P options because i was signed into my account. once, you're sign out they become available in those versions.
 
I uploaded a longer file in 1080P to YouTube last night. Today I was able to play it, but it looks like SD upscaled to 1080, in fact it looks like interlaced SD, upscaled, the jaggies are prominent everywhere and the images are very soft and blurred compared to the original file that I uploaded:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeVxtMajMMY&fmt=37

I guess 720P is about the max YT supports in terms of real detail. 1080P seems to get downsampled and then scaled back up at download.
 
Mark, the antique auto video took forever to download (YT's problem). Had to stop playing several times along the way waiting for it to catch up. Anyway, it didn't look bad on my monitor--"like SD upscaled."

Nice images, though! HD really shines when shooting high-gloss surfaces (no pun intended).
 
Jay, I'm glad you like the video. As you probably know, the images don't look anything like the file I uploaded, much less the master footage. For some reason, the YouTube version is plagues with jaggies, almost to the point where it looks like interlaced footage that's been deinterlaced. That could be it! Maybe YT deinterlaced all footage by default, even progressive footage.. that would reduce the vertical resolution to 540 lines. The file would still be 1080 lines high, but only 540 unique lines because they'd be in duplicate pairs.

Carl, I'm running nVidia Quadro FX4600, a relatively old video card, on a quad core clocked at 3.5GHz.
 
Basspig, I just watched it here in Fla. and it looked fine. No jaggies that I could see. I'm on a pretty fast conntection (20Mb download) so it was able to keep up with the buffering fairly well. It also defaulted to "HQ" playback without me having to press the selection button.
dave
 
Iudex said:
I don't understand why a lot of people here don't like to use YouTube... is it only because it "looks" not as "professional" as Vimeo or ExposureRoom?
Click to expand...

Since we are professionals who deal with images... It's pretty natural and expected that we mind about the looks of the medium displaying our work.

Right?

:thumbsup:
 
txhdave, I think it looks good if you don't have the original file to compare it with. The MP4 that I uploaded looks vastly superior to the recompressed version that YouTube encoded in Flash. The original looks very clean, but the YT version looks ragged, downrezzed and has jaggies very prominent. So much so, I had to confirm that the downloaded temp file was indeed the 1080 and not the low quality default version. It was indeed the 1080 file, so the only theory left that makes any sense is that YouTube runs EVERY file through a deinterlacer, whether it needs it or not. Also, the downloaded temp file shows a frame rate of 29.97, instead of 23.98, which is what I uploaded. It's been manipulated considerably. Perhaps I can do a frame grab of the two versions and take a small crop of both so you can see what I'm seeing...
 
After much frustration with screen captures, I found a way to capture images faithful to the original. Granted, this JPEG version lost a lot of color resolution, so the red trim on the car is pixellated, which was not the case on the MP4 uploaded version, and the difference, though still visible between YouTube and MP4 upload, it is diminished by the degradation caused by JPEG compression of the frame grab:

1260931862.jpg


On the left, is the YouTube cropped image, and on the right is the crop from the MP4 file that I uploaded to YouTube.
 
I've never been sure on this -- Do Vimeo, YT and Exposure Room display things at different framerates?

I've always heard Vimeo is native 24p, YT is 30p, and Exposure Room's framerate is based on whatever is uploaded -- hence my reason for always backing Exposure Room over the other two.

Am I wrong on this?
 
I think for what it is it looks fine. So it doesn't look great at full screen - OK. It is youtube after all. When it plays HD video at the size youtube defaults to it looks pretty good. Compared to what we were getting 4 years ago we are light years ahead. Yes, full-on HD over the internet would be nice. I just upload stuff at 720p and it looks pretty good. It's not about the detail of the image for me. It's about the story/composition. What story are we telling with our videos? We can tweak all the live-long day over image quality, but none of that matters without interesting subject matter. We've all laughed our as*es off at some cruddy 320x240 wmv of a guy falling on his face dancing at a wedding.

I get the point of this discussion, but content is still king.
 
You're right, Chadfish, but I think that YouTube's 1080p is pretty much an empty offering. It looks no better than the 720p offering (when I compare my 720p uploaded YouTube videos to this in full screen mode), so really it's just wishful thinking that spending twice the time to upload is going to give twice as sharp a picture--it is not. As you can see, about 70% of the detail is smudged in the YouTube version as compared to the uploaded file on the right half of the screen shot.

So my conclusion is that there is presently no visible benefit to uploading 1080p video to YouTube.


With regard to the comparisons with Vimeo, ExposureRoom, etc, only YouTube gets any kind of views. I still have stuff on ExposureRoom that I put up there 15 months ago that has single digit viewership. It's like, why did I bother, since no one's frequenting those sites. Only YouTube gets me over 10 views per month. It used to be much better before Google took over.. about 650 views in the FIRST HOUR after uploading a video, but now I have to wait a year to have 650 views on most videos. A 'fan' of mine even expressed frustration at the low viewership of my high quality video and sound productions on YT. Frustrating indeed, but still 10X more views than Vimeo/XR gets.
 
Yes youtube used to post the latest uploads on the main page. Even if it only stayed up a few minutes before the next videos pushed it out of the spotlight, you still got a little heat before hand. Also they manipulate the related videos and rankings to promote the content THEY want to sit at the top of the heap. It's not YouTube anymore, its ThemTube now. The man is running the show. Still it's a place where your videos can be discovered if you do your search terms well, and name your video appropriately - and have interesting content. But spotlight will now be reserved for the unofficially sanctioned videos that wag the dog of views due to manipulations by Satan, I mean youtube management. It's marketing silly! Their motto used to be "Don't be Evil", but that has changed.
 
I believe you are most likely 100% correct, Chadfish. There can be no other convincing explanation for the abrupt change in upload-to-view ratio that occured on January 2007. That was the first month Google owned YouTube. They definately changed it from a fair weighting to a biased one.
 
Bass... I checked your video yesterday and it looked clean enough to me. The jaggies are really weird, but perhaps the video is too sharp? Detail turned on on the EX1?

Does Vimeo still have the upper hand when it comes to image quality for HD? I don't know, need to compare:

Vimeo


YT


But YT is still nice for providing an easy non-HD that looks good right off the bat.

:thumbsup:
 
It looks 'okay' if you don't have access to the file that was uploaded. But when you look at the two side by side as in the screen grabs I provided above, the differences are staggering. YT and Vimeo are probably about the same bandwidth. But a comparison of your original uploaded file to the output of YT/Vimeo, would be more revealing.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top