YouTube Testing Higher Resolution Video
Posted by James | Filed under Play, Tube, Web
Following the announcement in November, YouTube has started to test higher quality videos. If you append &fmt=6 to the URL of a YouTube video, you should get better quality videos. Note that this works only for a small number of videos so far.
Here’s an example of a video that’s available in both the regular (320×240) version, and in a higher quality encoding (448×336). The audio is now encoded at a sample rate of 44100 Hz, up from 22050 Hz. As you can see from the screenshot, the right image is clearer and more detailed.
While this increase of resolution might seem minor, for the example above YouTube’s re-encoded FLV file is more than twice bigger than the old one (from 9 MB to 22 MB), so it will load much slower.
If you append &fmt=18, YouTube downloads the video as a MP4 (H264 with AAC audio), encoded at 480×360. Here’s the same video encoded as MP4.
To make things easier, there’s a Greasemonkey script that automatically adds the magic parameter for you.
Tags: encoding, higher quality, online video, video, youtube
Basics of Data Portability Explained
Posted by James | Filed under Future, Geek, Web
I’ve been reading a lot recently about data portability, and specifically the DataPortability.org Working Group. High level members of Google and Facebook staff joined the group about a week ago, key people from LinkedIn, SixApart, Flickr and Twitter joined a couple of days later, and Mozilla’s CEO said that his organisation is looking closely and will likely join the group.
That’s all well and good but does anyone actually know what we are waiting for?
Though it’s only been a week since Google and Facebook staff joined the organization, there’s been some key progress made this morning in explaining the aims of the movement. Whereas parts of Data Portability (like OpenID) have been plagued with foggy evangelistic efforts for years, check out the following video explaining the concepts. This strikingly well-produced work was made independently by screencaster Michael Pick of Smashcut Media.
DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.
I’m really impressed. The past week may have been more talk and hype than anything else - but talk plays an important roll in building pressure for change. Major vendors have come to the table, now advocates of change everywhere have one more useful tool in this video to make sure that the public doesn’t forget about the conversation that’s begun.
Though it appears that Data Portability has a long road ahead of it and that major vendors are unlikely to open up access to their users’ data, in fact openness has some important competitive advantages. The open and integrated vendor has far greater network effect and scale of access to data for their own purposes than the data hording vendor. The biggest challenge may be building a new social contract to protect customer privacy and control in this exciting new era of portability and personalization. You can join that conversation at DataPortability.org and elsewhere.
Michael Pick has chosen the easy-on-the eyes player from Vimeo to embed his video, the code to repost the video elsewhere is available with just a click or two from inside the player here.
Tags: dataportability, facebook, google, linkedin, mozilla, openid, portability, sixapart, twitter, video
Google launches privacy channel on YouTube
Posted by James | Filed under Geek, Privacy, Security, Tube, Web
Google launched a privacy channel on YouTube on Wednesday with videos explaining its privacy policies. The move comes on the eve of a two-day Federal Trade Commission-hosted town hall event on behavioral ad targeting to be held in Washington, D.C.
In a Google video titled “Google Search Privacy: Plain and Simple,” a Google support engineer draws on a whiteboard, explaining what type of information is collected by Google servers, such as IP address and cookie data, when you conduct a Google search.
Read on for the video, and more…
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
