YouTube To Support 1080p Videos Starting Next Week

[admin]

YouTube says they will now support 1080p videos starting next week, although viewing 1080p is already possible on selected video clips. The limit of videos being under 10 minutes will still apply, but the maximum upload size is set to be increased.

Apparently, you can test 1080p video yourself using the test video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUM1284TqFc&fmt=37

My CPU usage went up to 50% playing that, and only about 20-30% when playing 720p YouTube clips. If you add the "&fmt=37" to the end of links, quite a lot of videos previously uploaded as 1080p will now play in the native resolution (the "HD" button now has a selector that allows you to change to 1080p or 720p).

More:

http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/hometech/youtube-to-support-1080p-hd-videos-20091113-idwo.html

[drfsupercenter]

Woah, admin, what kind of CPU do you have?

It made mine spike all the way up to about 90%, and it settled at 70% after a few seconds. Format 22 videos barely use any. though, I blame Adobe Flash, I have a feeling if I download the mp4 file and play it with a better program it won't use as much memory (And I'm on a 2.4GHz Intel Core2Duo with 1GB video RAM!)

Cool idea though. I can't wait to watch movie trailers in HD without having to go through Apple QuickTime or whatever.

--EDIT--

OK, so my CPU was between 45-50% when using Media Player Classic x64. The HD button doesn't give me a choice, it just switches between normal and HD, not sure why - the video player is the same size as format 22, but that's only 480p... it's obviously playing the higher-bitrate video as it spiked my CPU.

[admin]

Here's another good 1080p test video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XITHbsUUlYI&fmt=37

I'm using Chrome under XP, with an Intel C2D E8500 and Radeon 4850.

I used the FF add-on Video DownloadHelper to download the 1080p version as a MP4 file (the add-on doesn't actually support 1080p video at the moment, so I had to copy the URL for the "format 22" version and manually change the URL's fmt=22 to fmt=37), played back the file in PowerDVD 9 with GPU assist turned on, and CPU usage was less than 10% this time (GPU usage around 5%).

It will be much better when Adobe Flash supports ATI GPU assisted decoding, which might be coming soon in Flash 10.1.

[drfsupercenter]

Oh, now I see the 720/1080 option.

And I've been using DownloadHelper for a long time... that's what I ended up doing too. Still uses over 50% of the CPU when watched in Firefox, but that's because it's Adobe Flash and Adobe programs are known to be bloated! In MPC it's much more moderate.

[admin]

New ATI Catalyst drivers out (9.11), which will add GPU assisted video decoding for Abode Flash (including YouTube HD videos) for all ATI 4xxx and 5700 and 5800 series cards. You will need the Abode Flash player 10.1 Beta to make it work, the final 10.1 version will be coming soon. So that's both Nvidia and ATI catered for ... bring on the 1080p!

[drfsupercenter]

I've got NVIDIA. LOL

[admin]

Nvidia GPU assist support has already been announced for Flash 10.1, and it should support most recent cards (I would guess 8000 series and above). The drivers to support this is already available, so it's just a wait for 10.1 to come out of beta.

Full list of support cards and chips available in this document:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.pdf

[dr_ml422]

YouTube says they will now support 1080p videos starting next week, although viewing 1080p is already possible on selected video clips. The limit of videos being under 10 minutes will still apply, but the maximum upload size is set to be increased.

Apparently, you can test 1080p video yourself using the test video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUM1284TqFc&fmt=37

My CPU usage went up to 50% playing that, and only about 20-30% when playing 720p YouTube clips. If you add the "&fmt=37" to the end of links, quite a lot of videos previously uploaded as 1080p will now play in the native resolution (the "HD" button now has a selector that allows you to change to 1080p or 720p).

More:

http://www.theage.com.au/digital-lif...1113-idwo.html

I couldn't get a straight play all the way through. It would stop and then start. When it did play the 1080p though my CPU just hit a tad over 24%. I have a 9500 BFG Nvidia card and a AMD Phenom II Triple Core CPU.

How can I view it straight through using WMP? How do you guys even download any of those clips? Is the choppy playback youtube's reception?


I got a straight play now and my CPU just hit 25%. So I guess that's ok? That was at 1080 P also.

[drfsupercenter]

DownloadHelper plugin for Firefox to download them.

Not sure if it supports 1080p yet though, I haven't tried it.