The lowdown on “High-Quality” youtube videos
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As you may have noticed, youtube has started offering some videos in a higher quality. What is this and does this mean youtube will eventually go HD?
A few weeks ago youtube rolled out 480×360 video playback. The videos play with less artifacts and are generally better looking. It is a step up from the old resolution.
Will this mean youtube will eventually go HD? Unfortunately no, at least not in the near future. We still dont have a solid replacement for the recently shutdown Stage6.
Our general philosophy is to make sure that as many people as possible can access YouTube and that videos start quickly and play smoothly. That’s one reason why you don’t see us racing to call this “Super Duper YouTube HD,” because most people don’t want to wait a long time for videos to play.
Torley
Friendly greetings, I make machinima (in Second Life) and am enjoying your blog! I appreciate YouTube’s improvements but I haven’t noticed much of a quality improvement — there was also a nasty audio distortion bug with their “hifi” mode I covered earlier: http://torley.com/5-youtube-problems-bugs-that-bother-torley
A good way to compare is to use http://www.tubemogul to upload to YouTube and a dozen other video sites at the same time, then view the results shortly afterwards. Altho it doesn’t support Flickr video yet (which only allows a max. length of 90 secs anyway), I’d have to give the big thumbs-up to Flickr video’s quality.
Torley
Oops, I meant http://tubemogul.com