"YouTube announced in November that they would be testing out encoding videos at higher resolutions (and with higher-quality audio encoding). Now it appears that a small sampling of uploaded videos can already be seen at their higher resolutions, simply by adding a little tag to the end of the video's URL. To get a (slightly noticeable) bump in resolution, try adding &fmt=6 to the end of the address line. The trick, according to YouTube watchers, seems to work primarily with newer videos, and bumps the resolution from 320x240 to 448x336. Add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL, and you might get an MP4-encoded version, with better audio and a 480x360 resolution"
Hell no, I converted the screenshot cuz it's s o big already. But I guess it's not a good idea when trying to prove something that would depend on the appearance of the pic..That's weird. If it's not your codec, you might want to check your settings with your youtube account. Click your name hero3bash>account>Video Playback Quality> Make sure it's NOT ticked at "I have a slow connection. Never play higher-quality video."
So I uploaded screenshots again, now with the real colors.. But the videos are no different from each other.Hidden content (Click to reveal)(http://img507.imageshack.us/img507/3925/86555062qg3.png)
(http://img249.imageshack.us/img249/9753/89338530wt9.png)
I just played that same video with "&fmt=18" and it didn't show any difference AT ALL. however, I used "&fmt=6" and the resulting quality was much MUCH better.For me "&fmt=18" shows the video in slightly better quality than "&fmt=6". I don't really know why the results are so inconsistent from user to user at the moment.
Wow thats awesome, thanks for the tip. Didn't know about the video quality setting in account options, either!
BTW for people who can't tell the diff, the grass, trees, and character's faces are most noticably sharper in the "higher quality" vid.
It's not like HD or anything, but it is noticably sharper. No doubt from using less compression.
(http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/3429/28424921jy4.jpg)(http://img376.imageshack.us/img376/4065/81414895wu6.jpg)
Only reason I would think they'd hide this is so people who have computers/mobile devices that barely run youtube vids now, would choke under the extra CPU load.
And hey, this looks like a fun game. I'm definitely going to keep my eye on it.
Now: Think of this, goat... Are you sure those are the exact same frames? Perhaps one is a keyframe and the other is just a regular one.Well, they're identical, aren't they? Besides, with modern video codecs, it doesn't matter whether you're looking at a keyframe or a b-frame. They should look identical in quality.
And... Why would youtube keep several copies of each video in increasing qualities, at the same resolution, even?In case they decide they want to show higher quality videos, of course. So they at least need to save the original file. Them keeping several versions of the file would be purely for practical reasons: if they decide that they want to display higher quality videos someday, it'd be a lot easier to just say "stream the higher quality videos we made earlier" than "let's re-encode every single video we have on our site". About 10 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every second; you can see why the latter is impractical.
I did think atleast I had seen a difference.
Now: Think of this, goat... Are you sure those are the exact same frames? Perhaps one is a keyframe and the other is just a regular one.
And... Why would youtube keep several copies of each video in increasing qualities, at the same resolution, even?
I'm guessing the reason it doesn't work on everyone's system is why it is still in the testing phase.That should not be the reason (unless the higher quality videos use H.264, which is only available in the most recent versions of the Adobe Flash player). If someone's not seeing the difference, it must be because their browser is caching the old version of the video.
In March 2008, YouTube launched 'High Quality' versions of its videos. The new version offers a better video definition (480x360) in the AVC format for any video uploaded after this date. YouTube will decide which videos are capable of this improved quality based on the standard of the original upload. Users can choose "always show me higher quality when available" in their Account pages to switch automatically to the better quality.AVC is based on H.264, and I think their old flash used H.263. I set that account setting but it doesn't seem to always pick the best version for me. Maybe it's a safeguard so that mobile devices that can barely play standard size video don't have issues.
Standard / &fmt=6 HQ FLV / &fmt=18 MP4
Screen Resolution 320 x 240 480 x 360 480 x 270
Bitrate ≅ 200 kbps≅ 512 kbps≅ 900 kbps
Audio 22KHz 64 kbps Mono ABR 44.1KHz 96 kbps Mono CBR 44.1KHz 128 kbps Stereo
Frame Rate 30 24 30
Video Codec Flash Sorenson Flash Sorenson h.264
Audio Codec Mp3 AAC Mp3That's the maximize icon. It increases video size but doesn't change the quality since it's the exact same video, but stretched. The maximum video size of these high quality modes we're talking about is 480x360, the full size of the youtube video window, so any higher than that and you could actually have image quality loss with the stretch.
Erm guys... why not just use the icon in the bottom right corner of the vid to change the quality?