Are We Finally Getting High Quality YouTube?

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Something’s going on and I like what ReadWriteWeb is thinking. Supposedly YouTube is making an announcement tomorrow and no one is quite sure what the deal is. If it’s higher quality video, that would be great. YouTube has been using the old Sorenson codec since the beginning while other competitors have been rolling out higher quality versions with the On2 codec or even H.264. The one thing about the Sorenson codec was that it only required Flash 7, so YouTube worked with older versions of the player. Are they comfortable now with the penetration numbers so they’re opening up higher quality versions? YouTube is already doing a bunch of encoding to H.264 to support the iPhone so maybe now they’re exposing those files to the Flash Player which would help boost the penetration numbers for the latest update (I’m not sure what they are currently).

If it’s higher quality video then that’s a great thing for everyone. I still love YouTube but man the video is hard to watch at times. I think people have gotten acclimated to bad video quality on the web so a site like YouTube could go a long way towards raising everyone’s expectations.

[tags]Flash Video, YouTube, Flash Player[/tags]

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  • http://chuckstar.com/blog Chuck

    No matter what they announce, it is very strange that most YouTube videos are delivered in a format that cannot be viewed on the iPhone and most other mobile devices. Something remains ‘off’ there.

  • http://www.clevr.com/ Matt

    They’ve been testing this for a while, and quite a few videos are already available as H.264 without the iPhone. See here for example: http://youtube.com/watch?v=CQzUsTFqtW0&fmt=6

  • http://abdulqabiz.com/blog/ Abdul Qabiz

    @Chuck You can view YouTube videos on Nokia S60v3 i.e. Nokia N95 alike phones.

  • http://www.swartzfager.org/blog Brian Swartzfager

    They’ve announced the release of a new API that allows you to use YouTube as a web service: YouTube API and Tools.

  • KS

    They’re going to have serious competition, as NBC/Fox must have known their schedule. This is going to be HUGE.

    http://www.hulu.com/

  • http://www.zeh.com.br Zeh

    It’s probably just that the new format will be official. It has been in test for a few weeks, you can view videos in “higher” res if you add “&fmt=18″ to the end of the urls, or install greasemonkey extensions that play them by default.

    It’s h264, but it’s still pretty shitty (480×360, ~600kbps) though. Better than the current quality, but still far from everything of actual high quality.

    The good news is that it’ll probably make most people upgrade to the newest version of the Flash Player.