Youtube finally playing HD content

March 23rd, 2007

Graham send me an email just a few minutes ago informing me that Youtube users could finally upload high definition videos to Youtube which have the benefit of a much sharper, clearer image and the negative side effect (for some users) of a size increase of the videos.

This is however not the official solution but more a temporary solution found out by users who discovered that Youtube did not encode certain videos that have been encoded by the user to Flash Video format. Normally Youtube reduces the resolution of each video that gets uploaded which is the reason for the low resolution experience.

If a user uploads a video with the following settings it will not be encoded into a lower resolution. I will post some examples of high def Youtube videos and an instruction video as well at the end of the article:

640 x 480 size
An (Audio) framerate of 44100
A (Video) framerate of 25 fps
A bitrate of 320 kbit/s
Video bitrate varies:
2000 kbps for a 1:00 minute video
1000 kbps for a 2:15 minute video
512 kbps for a 4:00 minute video
4:3 Aspect ratio or your chosen ratio (4:3 is for widescreen)

There are two negative aspects. The first is a duration bug which does not display the right playing time of the video and the second is that it takes more time to stream the contents to the user to achieve a smooth video playback.

The benefits on the other hard are a much cleaner, sharper video that is a joy to watch.

Youtube HD Video