Youtube in theater quality?
Youtube videos now available in 4k.
By picking the Original option, under resolution settings (currently right next to the vuvuzela button), you can now view videos up to 4096p (4096 x 3072).You have probably noticed the progression of quality options on Youtube. 360p looks more like the original youtube size while 480p, and more recently 720p and 1080p looked much better.
You have probably also noticed that not all of those videos are really HD, which kinda sucks.
If you upload videos you probably eventually found out that with the help of some magic codecs (H.264) your video can get the HD badge, and people can select it and feel like they're watching High Definition.
Even if it's not.
Well 90% of the youtube videos (for a while, and still) with the HD badge were stretched to to the size of an HD video.So stretched to fit a sceme of either 1080 pixels down; 1920 pixels across (1080p) or 720 pixels down; 1280 pixels across.
Even if your video camera did not shoot that size (that many pixels down and across) Youtube can display the video in that size, using their own formatting and with some help from your codecs and settings before you upload.
I guess to fill that size, the pixels are stretched or duplicated somewhat. Which is why all these videos don't really look HD, but still much better quality than regular (Youtube) videos though.
Now with the Original option there is supposedly no stretching or manipulating of the pixels done on the Youtube side. Which, I guess means Youtube, will show the exact file you uploaded? (up to 4096p?)
Can we really get the full 4k experience from online streaming?
So with this in mind, you probably guessed there is no way your monitor can display 4k lines across (3072 down). That is, if your like most people, who'd be very lucky to even have a computer monitor with 1080 lines down and able to watch real HD.
I was also reminded of what Kristian Gabriel said in his blog post about Red 4k and Adobe; you need an impossible powerful computer to run 2k or 4k footage.
Considering that watching raw 4k files on your computer can be a problem, I imagine watching 4k live on internet would require some kind of compression for the average consumer to be able to do.
I'm a bit skeptical about the "Original" option, is it really showing the original footage? Are the uploaders responsible for keeping the videos within a valid kbps limit? Unfortunately I don't have a 4k camera (they are really expensive) to make a test video myself but I checked out some of the ones linked from the Youtube blog article where they announced the 4k option.
Check out the video below and be sure to select the "Original" setting, if available, could possibly default to 360p . So here's the link to the 4k playlist on Youtube.
To me it looks slightly compressed, and the framerate is slow but that could be my internet connection
