kottke.org posts about YouTube
You may have noticed that the video of Burn-E I embedded looked a bit better than a normal YouTube video. YouTube has been quietly offering high-quality versions of some of their videos for quite some time via a “watch in high quality” link just underneath the player. It’s not HD, but it’s definitely an upgrade of YouTube’s legendarily crappy video quality. By default all videos on YouTube and embedded on other sites load at normal quality, but there’s a way to set your default viewing quality to high, link to high quality video, embed HQ video, and even save HQ videos for later viewing.
Set your default viewing quality to high:
When you’re logged in, go to Account / Playback Setup / Video Playback Quality and set the option to “I have a fast connection. Always play higher-quality video when it’s available.”
Linking to YouTube videos in high quality:
If you need to link to a high quality video on your blog, append &fmt=18 onto the end of the YouTube URL, like so:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuqiGrWBRqE&fmt=18
Upon arriving at the YouTube page, you’ll see the highest quality video that YouTube pushes out. The full technical details are available here…basically it’s a mp4 encoded using H.264 with stereo AAC sound at 480x360.
Embedding high quality YouTube videos:
The &fmt=18 trick doesn’t work here, but a similar trick does. For each of the URLs in the embeddable code that you get from YouTube, add &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 onto the end, like so:
Saving high quality YouTube videos:
When you’re viewing a high quality video on YouTube, you can use the KeepVid bookmarklet to download the mp4 file for later viewing on your computer, iPod, or iPhone. I tested this with the Burn-E video and the resulting mp4 was in letterbox format (480x198, or roughly the standard 2.40:1 aspect ratio).
BTW, here’s a comparison of the low and high quality for the same video.
Low quality:
High quality:
Sources: Yahoo! Tech, jimmyr.com, My Digital Life.
Update: I switched the example videos and code because YouTube took the Burn-E video down.
Update: I got an email from a YouTube engineer who tells me that format 18 isn’t even the highest quality you can get. Check out Dancing Matt in format 22, aka 720p. Furthermore, some videos don’t have a format 18 version (if the uploaded movie doesn’t have sufficient quality, for instance). (thx, phil)
Someone has turned a YouTube video into a rudimentary game using the annotation feature.
You get to the “next level” by clicking annotations, which loads the next video. If you want to cheat ahead, all of the videos are available here.
Update: Andy points out that this YouTube text adventure game predates the game above.
James Danziger on the photographs of the Florida teens accused of beating a classmate and filming it for YouTube.
The pictures of the accused are startling in the banality of the faces. (While the spelling of many of the names — April, Britney, Brittini, Cara, Kayla, Mercades, Stephen, Zachary bring to mind a revived Mouseketeers.) A number of the girls look surprisingly similar, but minus the prison garb, they could just as easily be reacting to a berating for poor schoolwork. The boys, who were posted as lookouts while the girls carried out the beating, look a little more ready for jail.
The pictures are fascinating in the narrow range of emotion they convey, from self-pity to sullenness, but to my mind all stop before genuine contriteness. (I’m reading this in, of course, but I have a hunch I’m right.) Yet there’s an all-American look to these kids that can only remind us how narrow the line is between good and evil.
The original photos are here.
I may or may not be headed out to South Carolina this weekend—their Democratic primary takes place on January 26th—and the new way of learning about places before ya go is YouTube tourism. Apparently there is a lot of hunting (yikes!), fishing, and drag queens in blackface (double yikes). And then, on a much more serious note, there’s this short video of “Jared trying to live it up a few days before being sent to basic training at Fort Jackson, SC.” It’s posted a woman who wrote that “I am twenty years old..believe it or not. I am missing my husband terribly. He is at basic training in Fort Jackson, SC. He will be graduating in March. I can’t wait!”
I have finally found the guy I want to marry. Seriously, this is my favorite YouTube video right now, and I’m not even sure that I can explain why. Something about the soft color, and the quiet. And he’s so sensitive. (I sure hope he’s 18 or older or I’m gonna feel real bad inside.)
Wow, Vimeo has videos in HD…the best quality I’ve seen from one of the big video sites. You get so used to watching crappy quality stuff on YouTube that you forget how nice it can look.
Congrats to the Vimeo team on the launch of the latest version of the site. Here’s the announcement post. The login/signup page is awesome. I also like how Vimeo has found room in the crowded video-on-the-web field, even though YouTube dominates the space. Vimeo is to YouTube as Facebook is to MySpace…not in terms of closed versus open (you do know that Facebook is AOL 2.0, right?) but in terms of being a bit more well thought out and not as, well, ugly (and not just in the aesthetic sense).
Regarding the recent Google news (YouTube, DoubleClick, Dodgeball), Fred Wilson tells us it’s time to pour a little malt liquor on the ground and say goodbye to the old Google, the Google that we all know and love, and welcome the new Google, a big company, for better or worse. “Google’s lawyers are going to become their most important asset and when lawyers are more important than engineers to a company, you lose.”
Marc Hedlund, founder of the intriguing Wesabe, recently made this interesting observation:
One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn’t yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn’t get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.
A slightly related way of thinking about how to choose web projects is to take something that everyone does with their friends and make it public and permanent. (Permanent as in permalinked.) Examples:
- Blogger, 1999. Blog posts = public email messages. Instead of “Dear Bob, Check out this movie.” it’s “Dear People I May or May Not Know Who Are Interested in Film Noir, Check out this movie and if you like it, maybe we can be friends.”
- Twitter, 2006. Twitter = public IM. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that one of the people responsible for Blogger is also responsible for Twitter.
- Flickr, 2004. Flickr = public photo sharing. Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake said in a recent interview: “When we started the company, there were dozens of other photosharing companies such as Shutterfly, but on those sites there was no such thing as a public photograph — it didn’t even exist as a concept — so the idea of something ‘public’ changed the whole idea of Flickr.”
- YouTube, 2005. YouTube = public home videos. Bob Saget was onto something.
Not that this approach leads naturally to success. Several companies are exploring music sharing (and musical opinion sharing), but no one’s gotten it just right yet, due in no small measure to the rights issues around much recorded music.
Here’s a fun rumor. I heard that the staff of the Daily Show and Colbert Report upload the shows to YouTube as soon as they can after the shows air and then the next day, lawyers from Comedy Central hit YouTube with takedown requests for the uploaded shows. Which makes total sense…sort of. The people making the shows want them to be seen while the lawyers want to ensure that people are paying to see them. It’s a crazy media world we live in.
Nasty Nets used CSS positioning to “embed” one YouTube video into another. “Be sure to hit ‘play’ on both YouTubes.” Reminds me of the animated GIF mashups (more).
Deaf people are making good use of YouTube. “Many of them aren’t comfortably fluent in written language. For many more, sign is and always will be their first language. YouTube gives them an easy, expressive, unmediated channel for many-to-many communication.” (via rc3)
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