News
Nov 16, 2009

YouTube Incorporating 1080P HD Video on the Shelves

YouTube
YouTube... you've heard about it, you've watched videos on it, and you've even uploaded your own content on it; we all know and love YouTube. I'm a YouTube'r myself, and I personally love every bit of YouTube. Around December of last year, YouTube launched its HD video compatibility; making a lot of the videos on YouTube much more crisp in detail. When you're watching video's on YouTube, you can (most of the time) see a "HD" button at the bottom right of the YouTube player. Have you ever tried to click on this button?

YouTube does a great job with rendering videos to make the video fit in the best possible form for the player. I was happy when they added HD video as an option, but there was one drawback to it... file size. When you record in HD, it's significantly bigger in size than your normal standard setting on YouTube. But because YouTube is ran by Google, they have plenty of space to store its videos. And you know what, they're going to make all that space usable even more!

Yes, that's right, YouTube is getting 1080P HD video this week! There's both pros and cons to this new addition. On the good side, users will be able to see a more vibrant and clear video on YouTube, but on the negative side, it's going to take a little longer to render the video (see where the file size in coming into play here). If you're on a DSL internet connection, you minus well forget about the "HD" button on YouTube's video player. I know from my personal experience (I watch too many videos on YouTube) that sometimes videos can take longer to load than what I am willing to wait for. I've sat at the computer waiting and waiting for HD videos to load. People might say, "why don't you just watch it at the standard size;" if I can watch a video (on my high speed internet connection) at high quality, I would like to watch it that way. At some points, I have to switch off my HD videos and switch back the the standard 360P video because it's taking a long time to load.

In the end, I hope YouTube will do something about the download times of these videos. If you think about it, hundreds, if not thousands of videos are being uploaded to YouTube daily. That's a lot of bandwidth and server usage on YouTube's part. I hope, just hope, they will let us switch from 360P (standard), to 480P (HQ), to HD (720P), and then to the fullest HD, 1080P.

You can read YouTube's blog post here:

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/11/1080p-hd-comes-to-youtube.html?utmsource=feedburner&utmmedium=feed&utmcampaign=Feed:+youtube/PKJx+(YouTube+Blog)&utmcontent=Google+Reader

I've been happy with YouTube's download times for the most part; what about you? I would love to see your thoughts in the comments below.

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