Are you ready for the HD?

YouTube, it seems, doesn’t believe in hyped-up launches, preferring instead to soft-launch new features. Despite being a regular YouTube user, both watching an uploading videos, I was surprised by how many new features I found when I uploaded a new video last night.

You can now annotate your own videos, edit them and even swap the audio for something else. The newest feature is ‘Insight’: a button which lets the nerd in you satisfy your desire for statistics: you can see how many people viewed your video as a graph over time, when they viewed it, their location, what type of player they viewed it in and even Hot Spots, which – if there’s enough data – shows a graph of how hot or cold your video is at any particular moment. Clever stuff.

However, I’m more interested in the fact that the boffins behind the scenes have added ‘real’ HD support. This is in contrast to the ‘fake’ HD support they touted last year, which used a ‘High Quality’ moniker to confuse people into believing it was High Definition. Well, I was confused anyway.

I’ve been waiting ages for proper HD support as, being a foolish early adopter, have owned an HDV camcorder for several years. Of course, this stunning quality has been totally wasted on YouTube until now. Previously, friends and family had to make do with ‘awful quality’, where crisp facial details were reduced to a blocky mess akin to a mosaic, and any motion simply resulted in full-screen blur.

YouTube’s new HD support isn’t ‘proper’ HD, but it’s still a big step forward. It’s 720p, not 1080p, although this is understandable given the bandwidth 1080p would consume. And bandwidth is the biggest hurdle, since most people’s broadband connection runs at a piddly 2Mb/s – if that. 2Mb/s isn’t enough to stream HD video, unless it’s highly compressed, and that’s how YouTube does it.

Whatever you upload, it gets converted into a standard definition FLV video, plus an H.264 version if the original video was in HD. I experimented with a two-minute long HDV video, exporting it from Adobe Premiere in MPEG-2 format (the same as the original files) at 1,280x720 at 3Mbit/s with 44.1kHz MP3 audio. The resulting 75MB file was a pain to upload via my puny 2Mb/s broadband connection (with an upload speed of 379Kb/s) as it took a little over 28 minutes. After that, the rotating timer icon turned into a green tick (it’s a shame that the YouTube boffins have removed the progress meter), and I was able to play the video.

A message above the viewer warned me that processing was still taking place, and quality could improve once it’s finished. Annoyingly, there was no red HD button, which you need to click to select the top-quality version of the video. A quick search revealed that this doesn’t appear for a couple of hours, or at least until the processing is complete. Thanks for making that clear, boffins.

I duly waited and, sure enough, the magical red button appeared. When you click it, the player becomes larger than standard (856x480 pixels to be precise), but you’ll only see the full 720p version if you click on the full-screen button. Of course, unless your screen resolution matches this, you’ll see an upscaled or downscaled version, so to properly assess the quality, I watched the video on a 15.4in laptop with a 1,280x800 resolution. The trouble was, a 2Mb/s connection isn’t fast enough to stream the file, and the video turned into a slideshow. In the end I waited for it to buffer and then watched it.  

The overall was noticeably better than High Quality videos. Confirmation, if it was even needed, came in the form of approval from my technophobic wife who noticed the difference straight away.

Wanting to know what YouTube had done with my original MPEG file, I downloaded the converted video and used the brilliant gSpot to look at its details. The good news is that it was virtually unchanged – the resolution was the same, as was the frame rate (25fps). The average bitrate was just over 2Mb/s, which explains the jerky playback and the great quality. Sure, it’s a world away from the 25Mb/s 1080i quality from the HDV camcorder, but still good enough to see fine details.

If you want to check out my HD test video for yourself, press the play button in the viewer below to force the red HD button to appear, click it, then click the full-screen button and post a comment back here to tell me what you think.