macrumors.com — The reason for the delay is that Youtube will be encoding all of their videos into a "H.264 streaming-efficient compression format" specifically for the Apple TV. All of Youtube's videos are currently encoded in Flash Video (FLV) format.... Interesting coincidence: both the iPod and iPhone can play H.264 encoded video, but not flash.
Jun 1, 2007 View in Crawl 4
windwakerJun 2, 2007
Interesting coincidence: HD encoded video is encoded in H.264. HD video content must be coming to the iPod!
Closed AccountJun 2, 2007
Why I don't get is why we need so many GOTDAM formats! Almost every type of media player (i.e. PSP, Ipod, Zune...blah blah blah) all play different media. Everyone is always trying to push their own format. That's the reason I sold my PSP. (the games sucked anyway) Do you know how time consuming it is to keep converting to different formats for different players??? You can't just download from mininova and take it with you, you have to download, then convert for the player you own. SCREW that! and I don't see it getting any simpler.~mario
cleverboyJun 2, 2007
@herreisenheimThat's a nice write-up, but it sounds like you're equivocating, AND that some of your information is just *inaccurate*.You said that YouTube uses VP3, the basis of Theora, but according to what I've read, YouTube uses H.263 (Sorenson Video) codec, and that this is the codec responsible for video in Flash 7 (which no one I've seen confuses with VP3, just Wiki search VP3 and there'll be no reference of Flash). Starting with Flash 8, support was added by Macromedia for VP6, although YouTube has supported H.263 most widely due to the installed base of Flash 7 (YouTube doesn't require Flash 8). So, they would be adding H.264 to H.263 and ignoring VP3 and VP6 entirely.Moreover, you said that "small gains" can be had by using AAC for audio over Mp3. By most measures, that's not a "small gain". It's been said that a 160 kbps AAC file is similar in quality to a 192 kbps, and on this point most people agree. Is 10% a "small gain"? If I put money in my bank and got 10% interest on my savings account, I'd be estatic. If you only got 10% rate on your car loan, you'd do better to bring that sucker down.The bigger the numbers, the more significant it is. If you have 1MB of audio, you save 100K. If you have 2MB of audio, you save 200K. Savings is savings and as NSResonder said, support for H.264 isn't limited to AppleTV, but iPod, PSP, and iTunes (and various others). This compared on the device level to Flash video, which isn't really looked at as a delivery format (mostly just for streaming). You insist that while H.264 creates smaller video files than VP6 that it will be "about the same" after hinting and web optimizations, etc. Do you have anything to support this other than your guesswork?I don't know. I'm not a cheerleader for any technology, but I don't believe in glossing over the facts either.
richardhenryJun 2, 2007
I hope so; depends whether or not Apple can work with Adobe to tailor a solution for their platform (yes, I know the iPhone runs OS X, but since it's not running on Intel chips -or even Power PC- there will surely need to be some optimisation to ensure that Flash isn't running through some iPhone Rosetta equivalent).
vertinoxJun 2, 2007
or Newgrounds animations...
xisterJun 4, 2007
Not to mention it looks as though they upped the contrast and saturation on the vid which will help a bit also. (not in resolution but definition)
xisterJun 4, 2007
I take it Google and Wikipedia weren't installed on your version of the intranetz?<a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264</a>
ranguvarJul 11, 2007
Even with H.264 instead of the old Sorenson H.263, YouTube cannot catch up to Stage6.Even H.264 cannot beat out Xvid/DivX when one is at 320x240 and the other can reach up to 1920x1080. And also, one is at ~300kb/s, and the other is upwards of 2MB/s.This is good news, but not as good news as it will be when Stage6 announces DivX 7, wwith AVC encoding, and updates Stage6 to support AVC. Then I will jump for joy.
ranguvarJul 11, 2007
Okay, before more people get this wrong...YouTube's old video codec was NOT Flash. Rather, Flash is a streaming media standard. The codec used by Flash was Intel/Sorenson H.263, aka VP7. However, VP7 is proprietary.So, they used the default Flash standard of VP6. They could have used H.264 if they so chose, but then it would have taken much longer to encode each video as it entered their servers, too much to be worth it. Now that H.264 is more optomized and I bet they've upgraded their servers a few times, and Apple is pushing for iPhone/Apple TV/iPod compatibility, they'r ready to jump.The main point is the added compatibility. Video quality won't be too much better. Not much you can do to spruce up ~300kb/s content, except using AVC High profile with 16 reference frames, full trellis, exhaustive motion search, 3 passes... you get the idea.(From <a class="user" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP6:">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP6:</a> "In August 2005, Macromedia announced they had selected VP6 as the flagship new codec for video playback in the new Flash Player 8.")
picsfxSep 10, 2007
Joost looks very cool any chance of you sending me an invite to Joost?
trancosSep 29, 2007
If you download the video, the file is, beside the .flv extension, an H.263 codec, 480 x 320 resolution, with a 1200 kbits/s bandwith, compressed with Sorenson. Far higher than the 320 x 240, 300 kbits/s standard of Youtube.
jane1210Feb 28, 2009
i am using Moyea youtube flv downloader, It downloads fast with very high quality, and it's free! it can help you save and download off YouTube, Google Video, Hulu, Fox and more to your computer hard drive. <a class="user" href="http://www.flv-to-video.com/youtube-flv-downloader">http://www.flv-to-video.com/youtube-flv-downloader</a>