Oh Me, Oh My – YouTube Supports 720p
Posted by Brooks in AIR, Flash, Flex on Nov 18th, 2008 | 3 commentsCaught this info via a Ryan Stewart tweet last week. Looks like YouTube supports up to 720p video if the source video is high enough quality.
Good to know. The real question is WTF Google? Why don’t we know what exactly all the requirements are? For instance, I work for a company that would be very interested in knowing how to achieve pass through upload (we encode video to YouTube’s specs and then upload and thereby skip the YouTube encoding step–saving time and YouTube CPU). If you, YouTube, insist on being the 800 lbs. gorilla, its high time you were WAY MORE TRANSPARENT. I want a legit service that’s not so opaque and has real features instead of hacks posted on blogs. Just my two cents. ;-)
3 Responses to “ “Oh Me, Oh My – YouTube Supports 720p”
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It would be nice if they would give you exact standards so that you could achieve the maximum quality today.
I think Youtube is going for a more general longer term approach because the standards change so quickly. It is my understanding that they archive the original uploaded content so that as quality standards increase they can re-encode all videos to the highest currently supported end user format – from the originally uploaded content. I doubt their “best format” stays “best” for long. Maybe? Yea, you’re right – they should be more transparent. :)
@Travis – good point trav, but let me decide whether I care about reencoding to some future standard. In reality most of the content uploaded to YouTube is of such low quality that such an effort doesn’t have much tangible benefit to the vast majority of users.
I see your point. I think you’d be surprised how much of the content uploaded to youtube is actually really high quality. I an addict of lectures and I find lots of super high quality lectures on youtube.
What I find coolest about your post is the idea of sending a perfectly formatted video to youtube so that it would return an instantly viewable file w/out the crappy process of waiting for it to convert. Waiting for processing gets annoying. I’ve waited for 2 hours only to have youtube tell me the file encoding didn’t work. For jing it would be sweet to pass an instantly viewable youtube file to the clipboard.