The Age of Grainy Web Videos Has Come to an End: YouTube Turns on HD
Just about three weeks ago, we reported that YouTube was testing high-definition videos, and today it seems like this feature has been officially released. A large number of videos that fulfilled YouTube's criteria for HD encoding now sport a 'watch in HD' button instead of the old 'watch in high quality.' We have not seen any official statement from YouTube about this yet, but you can already find a lot of HD videos on YouTube now if you do a search for 'HD' on the site.
Until today, you could only see these HD versions if you added "&fmt=22" to a YouTube URL and it was almost impossible to know which video would work in HD.
As we pointed out in our earlier story about these HD videos, the quality is amazing and rivals that of some of YouTube's closest competitors like Vimeo. However, it is also worth noting that you need a relatively fast broadband connection to watch these videos without constant stuttering and buffering.
Just in the last couple of weeks, YouTube has been rolling out a wide variety of new features, including the new wide-screen format (which was clearly in preparation for this release) and the addition of over 25k new songs from music licensing firm Rumblefish to its AudioSwap feature.
Game-Changer
These new HD videos, however, are clearly a game-changer. Web video always had the name of having relatively sub-standard video quality and being generally grainy and hard to watch (and YouTube especially). Now, you could easily put up a screen-cast on YouTube in HD, or film a video with your new Flip MinoHD and have it seen in its full 720p glory.
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Wow! This is big news.
I blogged my experience here:
http://offonatangent.blogspot.com/2008/12/youtube-turns-on-hd.html
"I'd already uploaded this video on November 26th BEFORE YouTube turned on HD.
They seem to have recognized that my footage was HD and changed the link to "Watch in HD.""
Did they also adjust the audio-quality?
As far as I know youtube limits the audio to crappy 56 bit/s due to the demands of the music-industry because they feared otherwise people would convert youtube music-clips to mp3, but high quality video and crappy sound doesn't fit very well!
This is SO awesome. We've been waiting for this forever and you're right, the HD vid looks phenomenal.
Can't wait to film the Moxie Mo Show podcast in HD now!
I might finally be able to stop doing video twice, once for discovery on YT and again for quality on BCove or Vimeo. Now if the web and YT could figure out a business model that can pay the content owners, we might just have a real business instead of a playground.
Jeff Bach
Quietwater Films
Madison, WI.
This is a good news ,no one will now leave YouTube .
Can you embed in HD also? if so vimeo's pretty much a waste of money.