Original Blog

Back near the end of August 2008, I opened an account on YouTube as a "just in case" backup if LiveVideo were to go off the air. Obviously this did not happen.

LiveVideo has had an impact on YouTube. YouTube has been displaying their videos at the same size as LiveVideo (425x334). This doesn't improve the picture quality of course. They are still using a lower bit rate than LiveVideo. Also, YouTube is still down mixing audio to monaural at a lower bit rate. So YT's audio also sucks.

Edit: LiveVideo uses 445x369.

YT's next salvo seems to be increasing their upload size limit. It is now 10 minutes and 1024MB. That is not a typo. You can upload a 1024MB file. I tested this with a 720p video that I made. The file encoded to 993.3MB. Close enough. The bit rate on the file is just a shade over 16Mbps. It is a proper 16:9 HD file except that I made the frame rate 24fps.

You would expect that such a high quality file would produce a high quality video on YT. I was expecting it. Or, to be more accurate, I was curious if it would or if YT would just knock it down to their usual pathetic bit rate. Well guess what they did? Yep. Pathetic bit rate.

The video itself isn't very interesting. I was just documenting the decay of an old house. I was also playing with certain camera settings. Still, the quality should have been much better.

Sorry, YouTube. The very fact that you still maintain a ten minute playback time limit does not make it worth uploading a super large file when you are just going to ruin it. You fail.

Addendum

I tested out what I found at the URL that Swipe posted and was rather surprised at what I found. I also corrected the upload limit for YT. I tried to embed the high resolution video in this blog, but YT is effectively blocking me from doing that. If anyone can tell me how to fool the flash player into streaming the higher quality stream, please let me know.

In the meantime, you will just have to follow this link to YT to see and hear the difference.

LV, you may need to do some catch up. I hope you keep the original files like YT does. I do like LV much better than YT. But I do dig getting better video and audio quality.

Also, a minor LV annoyance, is that the html I post in my blogs gets parsed. Specifically the object tag is not allowed. Also, the embed tag gets turned into an object tag! I'm sure there are valid security reasons for doing this. I would not trust random html either. Imagine what you can do with iframe and a few other tags. Cross site scripting attacks anyone? Oh well. Just ignore this last paragraph and pretend you never read it.