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
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.
