Just about a month ago YouTube was testing high-definition videos. It seems like this feature is now officially released. A large number of videos that fulfilled YouTube's criteria for HD encoding now sport a "Watch in HD" button instead of the old "Watch in high quality." While I have not seen any official statement from YouTube yet, you can already find a lot of HD videos on YouTube if you do a search for 'HD' on the site.
Until now
Until now you could only see these HD versions if you added "&fmt=22" to a YouTube URL and it was almost impossible to know which video would work in HD. The quality is really amazing and rivals that of some of YouTube's closest competitors like Vimeo.
The price
Yes, there IS a price. Actually a requirement that might cost you some extra money -- you do need at least a 5 Megabit (download) broadband connection to watch HD videos without constant stuttering and buffering.
In the last couple of weeks YouTube has also rolled out a wide variety of new features, including the new wide-screen format (which was clearly in preparation for this release) and the addition of over 25 thousand new songs from music licensing firm Rumblefish, plus its AudioSwap feature.
Game-Changer
The new HD videos, however, are clearly a game-changer. Web video always had the contention of having relatively sub-standard video quality; being generally grainy; and also hard to watch ( especially YouTube). Now, you could easily put up a screencast, movie, or video on YouTube in HD see it in its full 720p glory.
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2 comments:
Introduce a good software, Bywifi--Video Streaming Downloader. It supports youtube HD.
http://www.bywifi.com/
Bywifi (Video Streaming Downloader) is a free program for downloading, transcoding and accelerating video streaming. It supports downloading, transcoding and P2P accelerating videos from all video websites, such as Youtube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, MySpace, Yahoo, etc.
I'llcheck out Bywifi and report on it if warranted. Thanks for the tip!
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