RSSYouTube offers videos in HD
By Tim Conneally | Published December 19, 2008, 11:53 AM
Google's popular video site YouTube yesterday unveiled a dedicated HD section for US users to watch videos in 720p high definition.
When a video's source upload supports higher resolution, YouTube will have a "watch it in HD" button below the player's lower right hand corner in the space where some videos had the "watch it in high quality" button. Clicking this button expands the standard viewing window to 16 x 9 with a 1280 x 720 resolution.
YouTube recommends that users who wish to have their content available in HD pay close attention to the file's aspect ratio. The new widescreen player will automatically add "pillarbox" bars to 4:3 videos, so if a video was already letterboxed to fit the 4:3 window, it will be doubly resized, and will create a "bad viewing experience."
Resolution of 720p is quickly becoming standard among web video sites. Last year, Vimeo made its mark as the HD equivalent of YouTube, attracting filmmakers and artists. The introduction of HD on YouTube has already caused debates between Vimeo users about which is better. Professional content syndication sites such as Hulu already offer HD as an option, and Netflix and Amazon video on-demand services will soon offer high definition through the browser as well.
i have a question is the internet just the US? stop with all this content restriction, is this really the direction we want the net to keep going?
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|Too bad most of the so called "hd" videos look like SD videos converted to a larger screen size. Also, the content sucks as of yet.
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|This looks and performs quite well. I seriously was wondering about youtube for a while, but it seems this really works well and keeps them on top.
Too bad you can't do anything about their fairly bad interface/comments.
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|You can add features to comments (on YouTube or any other site) with this software http://fileforum.betanew...commentino/1229288074/1
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|Why not 16 by 10?
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|This is horrible news from an IT perspective. Unfortunately, we can't block youtube with our firewall because too many of our attorneys use it in regards to court cases, but dangit, we have enough bandwidth problems as is!
(I realize this is completely random and less than 1% of you even care, but I had to throw this out there)
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|Get faster fiber. We have no issues. Looks like one HD stream is about 5 Mbps +/- 1 Mbps. Easily doable in any firm above 20 attorneys.
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|I used to say "view in HD", then "view in high quality", now back to "view in HD"
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|I still prefer vimeo.com for High Definition content. The community there seems to be closer and the footage that is on there is just breathtaking.
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|Thank God we can still block that one through our firewall (see my post above).
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