YouTube in HD

If you've been following Twitter activity today, you'll know that YouTube quietly and unofficially upgraded their video playback to HD (sort of). The reason I say "sort of" is due to the ambiguity as to what is "HD." Technically, if the video has at 720 (or 1,080) horizontal lines, then yes, it is HD. However, with bit rates at around 1 mbps (1 megabit per second or 1,000 kilobits per second), the quality, in my opinion, would not qualify as true HD. Certainly nothing like the 18 mbps HD content that CBS spits out over the air.

This is a great leap forward, though. And kudos to YouTube. I can only imagine they're waiting for the power users to kick the tires before making a formal announcement.

For a quality comparison, I've shown here still captures of the first frame of this great video done by Derek Truesdale. Below are the three quality options now available: HD, Higher Quality, and Normal. As you can clearly see in the HD still, Derek has a mole on his left cheek, just to the right of his mouth. (Apologies to Derek -- he is quite fetching.) While watching the "Higher Quality" version, you can still make it out, and in the "Normal" version, you can barely tell it's there. This gives a good indication of the quality differences.

HD

HIGHER QUALITY

NORMAL

You'll also notice, along with the lack of fanfare about this, that the user's video playback quality settings have not changed. They remain the same as before the introduction of the HD option:

If you wish to play around with this yourself, click to watch Derek's video. When it's loaded, you can either toggle among the different playback quality settings just below the video to the right or add this text after the video's URL and reload:

• &fmt=9 for Normal quality 
• &fmt=18 for Higher quality
• &fmt=22 for HD

Play around with it, and comment back to let me know what you think.

Comments

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[...] YouTube in HD [...]

[David Kawalec]

Great news. YouTube looks really bad over Apple TV. Is all content available as "HD" or only newly-uploaded ones?

(Of course, 1 megabit per second is 1,024 kilobits per second)

[mattsnod]

Any content uploaded that had an upload size of 720 horizontal lines or greater will be considered by them to be HD, and therefore have that "Watch in HD" link.

And I felt I may be getting a bit too technical anyway for the whole "how big is a kilobit" thing :)