YouTube is officially braindead now

[Jonathan]

This 4K thing is absolutely ridiculous. Isn't this some sort of prank?

[Phytotron]

Surely.

The "super high speed broadband" remark strikes me. That still wouldn't help my computer or browser better process these videos—videos which still get jittery/stuttery/low-frameratey/whateveritis at even 480p sometimes (yet, as I mentioned in that other thread about flash, I can play an actual DVD just fine).

[Clutch]

This essentially describes youtube.

[Titanoboa]

link

aahah. When you think about it, that's very well made.

double post cracked me up.


As for the 4k, It worked as good as 1080p for me, but couldn't really spot any remarkable difference from 480p. I'm pretty sure I'm still going to use 480p, or whatever below that is the best available, but if there's anyone out there who gets a sweeter life from watching youtube videos in "4k", why shouldn't we let them? We can still choose another alternative.

(Watched The Birth of a Violin. Why did he bother playing at the end of the video if he wasn't gonna hit the notes. Neat melody, but seriously, violinists should need a license. also don't drink and fiddle!)

[Jonathan]

Phytotron: Besides the lack of merit (which I won't even talk about now), it's pathetic. It's encoded at 6 Mbps ("ultra-fast high-speed broadband connections" - not really), and with low-quality settings at that so it can possibly be decoded in realtime. The result is something they can call 4K because the pixels are technically there, but the quality is worthless. Though, if they can apparently afford 6 Mbps bandwidth now, why not encode 720p at that bitrate? That would almost look good.

As for old hardware, do note the compression efficiency of modern codecs like H.264 needs more power than MPEG-2. Flash isn't perfect, but your hardware will be struggling regardless.

[madmax]

Surely.

The "super high speed broadband" remark strikes me. That still wouldn't help my computer or browser better process these videos—videos which still get jittery/stuttery/low-frameratey/whateveritis at even 480p sometimes (yet, as I mentioned in that other thread about flash, I can play an actual DVD just fine).

Tried YouTube with HTML5?
http://www.youtube.com/html5

[Jonathan]

Heh. Actually their HTML5 can't do 480p, as their 480p is only available in .flv. You'll be stuck with 360p and perhaps 720p+, which means just 360p again if you couldn't play 480p in Flash. Even if you can play everything just fine, you're depriving yourself of quality because a lot of videos are 480p, but no higher (i.e. in HTML5 you can only get 360p). Not that the HTML5 player is actually used by YouTube very often, no matter how hard you clicked to enable it. (This is speaking from an H.264 perspective; maybe the WebM crowd has a different view.)

[epsy]

Well, I have that enabled and I'm definitely satisfied. I pretty much traded "quality"(not much noticed here..) for less CPU usage, less fan noise, no more crashes, no more soundloop bugs. Apart from the random video that will just not load once in a while, I'd definitely recommend it.

[Word]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOByPlmd ... re=related

wouldn't have found this without youtube

[Pr3]

This is interesting because not 2 long ago one of my uploads had the option "Original"

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq-DXvrZsK4

[Jonathan]

That's the halfway sane part: you're not forced to get videos resampled to whatever format anymore. Your video is 1920x1200, basically 1080p but a bit taller for an aspect ratio of 8:5 (16:10, as they like to call it). So, 1080p is 1728x1080, and now you can see the original 1920x1200 as well.

epsy: Flash must work pretty well for me then. It sucks, but it's the most robust way to browse the 'tube. I hope I can soon do without though.

Edit: Here's a list of video formats I got using Flash and HTML5. Actual size in (), likely limits in [], and file size in bytes (bitrate!):
240p flv Flash (320x200) [320x240] 492681 (old video codec; 22.05 kHz MP3 audio)
360p mp4 HTML5 (480x300) [480x360] 927855
360p flv Flash (576x360) [640x360] 1095722 (I recall this one has low-bitrate audio, but can't check in a silent video)
480p flv Flash (768x480) [854x480] 2061624
720p mp4 Flash&HTML5 (1152x720) [1280x720] 3430771
1080p mp4 Flash&HTML5 (1728x1080) [1920x1080] 6026674
Original mp4 Flash (1920x1200) 6423760 (48 kHz audio; HTML5 interface probably lags behind as this is .mp4)

Please don't sue me, YouTube. Educational purpose, no copyright infringement intended (not that there's much copyright in there), etc.

[warclown]

This 'Original' had no difference from standard 1080p on my HD 24" monitor. For me, I find that 720p is the best bufferingtime:quality.