YouTube HD Now Even Bigger & How To Upload In HD on YouTube
More YouTube in HD stuff.
YouTube HD Now Even Bigger
First when YouTube “went widescreen,” meaning, when it changed it’s traditional 425×320 pixel viewing size to 640×360, it made the videos a bit bigger looking. Now they’ve taken things a step further. For videos uploaded in HD, 720p to be exact, they now view in a much bigger size, 854×480. That’s huge! See here for yourself.
Besides the minor formatting weirdness of the profile sidebar now being beneath the video, I find the size change quite welcome. If the video is in 720p, 1280×720 pixels, why not have it view in a bigger size, in “480p”, before the user clicks on Full Screen mode? The video in the screenshots is Wasat Studios’ feature, Extinguishing The Fire, btw.
How To Upload In HD on YouTube: Tips & Tricks
As editor of Wasat Studios, I recently uploaded our first video in HD 720p, part 1 of Defending The Prophet (S) Against Orientalist Critique by Yasir Qadhi. After seeing how nice the video looked, I decided to start re-doing our videos in the HD 720p format that YouTube has so lovingly embraced.
If you want to upload in HD, make sure you take heed of the following:
- Resolution. First and foremost, obviously, export your video in 720p (duh!). That is, save a video in 1280×720 pixels.
- Filesize. YouTube now allows up to 1GB per video, so don’t worry so much about filesize. For longer videos you probably want to encode at a lower bitrate, and I’d recommend not going anything less than 1.5 mbps. For videos 10 minutes or shorter, bump that bitrate up!
- Getting “Watch in HD” to show up. I’ve found that if you add information to your video while it uploads (a new feature YouTube added to its uploader), it will interfere with your video being able to play in HD. The same goes for uploading files in 480p for higher quality. I’m not sure why, but this has happened to me more than once, making me have to reupload some videos. When I uploaded it without adding any video details until the entire upload had finished, however, the HD option shows up. This one is key to remember.
Do you even watch YouTube videos in HD?
That’s the question I’d like to ask all of you non-uploaders and “normal” viewers. Everyone watches on YouTube here and there, but do you find yourself watching in HD? Or is the bandwidth and processing requirements too much for your machine?
I’m trying to get an idea of how many average casual watchers actually care or even make use of the HD feature. I use it for sure, because it just looks so darn good and alhumdulillah my computer is able to handle the load. While it takes longer to load each video, for me it’s worth the wait.
December 18th, 2008 at 10:18 AM
HD on YouTube still needs more work.
I’ve been playing around with several different compression settings for playback of HD on youtube. The best one that’s worked so far for me is encoding settings at:
1280×720h.264 encoder 2-pass encodeAverage bitrate 7,000KbpsThe above setting hasn’t proven to be perfect yet. I have yet to try divx encoded file upload which I’ve read works best.
December 18th, 2008 at 10:51 AM
YouTube has always said DivX is the best for them. For some reason, though, I haven’t tried to experiment with DivX. It could be because when I last tried (2005), it was difficult for me to customize it for best compression and quality optimization. I’ll have to give it a try again, but for now for me it’s WMV because it’s so easy.
December 18th, 2008 at 7:14 PM
lol. WMV so far has given me the worst results in my HD testing so far.
December 18th, 2008 at 8:53 PM
i take issue with your condescending way of calling me a "normal viewer" lol
ya HD on youtube is sick. it does take a lil longer to load, but its definitely worth it.
December 18th, 2008 at 9:49 PM
Belal, your advice is always golden for me, jazakAllah khair. I started playing around with mp4 format in the H.264 codec and the results are quite spectacular. Go Premiere Pro’s powerful Adobe Encoder for the win.
I guess I never explored outside WMV because I was stuck in the "YouTube limits filesizes to 100MB" days. Now that we’re passed that, it’s time to move on!
December 18th, 2008 at 10:34 PM
HD takes forever to load. But its def. worth it if you have the bandwidth, everything looks awesome in HD. Especially poorly authored skits directed towards young children trying to control their anger.
December 22nd, 2008 at 11:25 PM
I wonder what the results of using Magic Bullet Instant HD will have on SD video when working w/ YouTube.
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:39 PM
Interesting software. Belal (and others), I’m going to let you in on a secret. All the stuff I’ve been uploading in HD is actually upscaled.
I simply had backups of the original captures in DV-AVI and output it in 1280×780 through Adobe Media Encoder. Results turned out nice, and now after trying the H.264 codec in mp4 format it looks to be even better!
From now on, though, inshaAllah, I’ll be capturing in HDV (1080i) and then downscaling to 720p. We’ll see if that brings a difference.
January 11th, 2009 at 1:20 PM
Minimum requirements for creating Youtube HD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGwCfONnnR4
April 1st, 2009 at 1:27 PM
I have a enough bandwidth for youtube HD… but more poor little pentium 4 cant process the HD h.264 video stream.
April 2nd, 2009 at 7:29 PM
Have you tried Vimeo.com, it seems like their video quality is better, and so is the production quality of the material that is on their site.
April 5th, 2009 at 10:12 AM
@Afroz: I have definitely tried Vimeo and am very impressed with its quality. Only reason I stick with YouTube is because of its reach; everyone’s on YouTube. Plus Vimeo seems to have a different audience and maybe a different aim. InshaAllah if and when sites like Vimeo surpass YouTube in popularity, I’ll see about switching over.