While I move house, here's two videos you may find interesting:
Vint Cerf on video distribution
Internet pioneer looks at video's future
Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google, speaks at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York Tuesday about his vision of a solution for video distribution via downloads. He says online video will be distributed in broadcast mode.
Length: 08:11
Daily Debrief: How to break the P2P logjam
Video: Hogging web traffic with P2P transfers
CNET News.com's Charles Cooper speaks with Webware Editor in Chief Rafe Needleman about what one of the founding fathers of the Internet is doing to resolve the growing problem of peer-to-peer transfers.
Length: 04:23
Right, time to uproot the PCs. They're always last to leave the house!
Update, 18/05/2008: YouTube have slightly revised their interface, and are also rolling out a new player... The short instructions to see high quality videos: add &fmt=18 to the end of any YouTube URL and hit Enter to reload the video.
You'll then notice that a link should appear underneath the player saying "watch this in standard quality" - if so, you're watching the higher quality video, and clicking it will show the lower quality version you'd normally receive. You don't want to do this ;)
Going into your User Preferences (click on Account at the top of the page once you've logged in), going to the bottom of the page, clicking on Video Playback Quality and choosing the "I have a fast connection. Always play higher-quality video when it's available" option will sometimes force this option. Again, this is somewhat at YouTube's whim whether you get the high quality video or not, and I've noticed my account has been reset to the "Choose my video quality dynamically based on the current connection speed" option a couple of times now.
The longer explanation, and a commentary (with quality comparison) continues below.
I noticed the other day that YouTube's started to quietly trial higher quality video playback for an increasing amount of their video content. For me this is a long-overdue, very welcome upgrade. Low quality video and 64kbps MP3 audio are fine for the 1990s, but we're in the 21st century now thank you very much. Finally, Google gets with the plan... And here's the quick-'n-dirty hack to get higher quality playback even if YouTube doesn't want you to have it right now.
A few words before we get to the juicy bit: the experience isn't perfect yet, but this is a comparatively trial (if annoying) issue for the time being. For videos 'ingested' (i.e. uploaded by users) into the YouTube backend that were encoded as native or anamorphic widescreen (16:9, like DVDs), the higher quality videos currently play back vertically stretched to a 4:3 aspect ratio, which I've concluded is due to the player not correctly handling the higher quality widescreen content. The most likely explanation is that it either doesn't respect the 'widescreen' flag in the video (if there is one) or it can't properly display widescreen videos that haven't been encoded in a letterboxed 4:3 aspect ratio.
(Haven't a clue what I'm on about? Along with the two links in the previous paragraph, this page has quite a nice visual side-by-side comparison of what anamorphically-encoded widescreen content looks like versus regular 4:3 video.)
I'm positive that the video aspect problem is a YouTube player problem because I downloaded the the actual .flv video file with a bit of creative Wiresharking, and played it in a standalone player (I use the excellent free FLV Player from Martijn de Visser). The video displayed correctly - and it both looks and sounds fantastic.
I could actually put up with YouTube videos if they were all this quality to start with! With a decent original quality source, the quality's roughly comparable to 350Mb TV episodes (or, if you're a UK web surfer, only slightly lower quality than the BBC's iPlayer streaming videos).
I've noticed this problem with the YouTube player more than once, including on content I've encoded and uploaded to YouTube myself (and I've filed a bug report), so hopefully this will be sorted out when the higher quality video is rolled out to more of YouTube's users. They can't leave YouTube with a broken player, and I doubt they'd reencode all of the widescreen video...
Anyway, on to the most important bit! Because the "watch this video in higher quality" links aren't always visible to everybody, I thought I'd point out that there's an easy way to force the higher quality stream every time you visit a page - just append "&fmt=18" (without the inverted commas) to the URL, and hit Enter to reload the page. (Yes, I know the 'hit Enter' part shouldn't need mentioning, but there are still some people who press the Go button with their mouse, my mum amongst them!)
If you're not too familiar with URLs, it's not hard - if you're passed a YouTube URL like http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=wwJa1fftrr0, just add &fmt=18 to the URL so it now reads as http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=wwJa1fftrr0&fmt=18... When you load that page, it'll show the video in higher quality (and show a "Watch this video in lower quality for faster playback." link underneath the video player). If the URL looks longer or has other crap on it (like referring URL info or looks a bit like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxvxSwUecWY#qIZOG5m5PCM you can either delete all the stuff after the initial video ID (the alphanumeric characters straight after "?v="), or you can add &fmt=18 to the very end of the URL.
Wired also have a few other methods you can employ to always get higher quality playback, including a couple of methods you might have overlooked.
A still showing LQ vs. HQ - click for larger version
What should be immediately noticeable is the audio quality, but videos with a lot of motion will benefit too. If the video doesn't load, the higher quality video might not be encoded yet, or there might be a backend problem... All I can suggest is that you try again later, this feature isn't even being advertised yet so what do you expect? ;)
For the techies, the "watch this video in lower quality for faster playback" link both points to the URL with the &fmt=18 appended, and also toggles a JavaScript variable:onclick="changeVideoQuality(yt.VideoQualityConstants.LOW); return false;"
I've not checked, but I guess from the above that when you toggle the low quality video, the link's updated to update the value to 'VideoQualityConstants.HIGH'.
A word on bandwidth consumption... I'm not worried about Google's side of the deal, I'm sure they have ample bandwidth to cope with the higher quality - it's the end users who might get a bit of a shock when their next bill arrives from their ISP if they watch every video in high quality. As a guideline, watching high-quality videos on YouTube roughly doubles the amount of data downloaded for each video, so if you're on a limited-bandwidth broadband package (whyyyyy?!) then be mindful of the higher tariff this imposes on your limited available bandwidth. For the link I used above, a Fifth Gear clip called "VW Golf GTI vs Subaru Impreza WRX Shootout", the low quality video is 9.6Mb, and the higher quality video comes in at 19.3Mb. The video resolution is 480x264 pixels, encoded in H.264 (with an 'avc1' codec ID). The audio is AAC ('mp4a' codec ID). Here's how Media Player Classic reports it:
Audio: AAC 44100Hz stereo 125Kbps [(C) 2007 Google Inc. v06.24.2007.]
Video: MPEG4 Video (H264) 480x264 [(C) 2007 Google Inc. v06.24.2007.]
The average video bitrate clocks in at anything between 400kbps and 1mbps, and that's not including the ~128kbps for the VBR audio. Yes, I said 128kbps audio at 44.1kHz! ("CD" quality on YouTube, finally!) The peak quality of the video is 977kbps, so we're dealing with much better raw quality. The higher quality video also has a 25fps framerate, not the 10-18fps of the original quality video. $deities be praised!
For comparison, here are the statistics for the original, low quality version of the same video:
Audio: MPEG Audio Layer 3 22050Hz mono [Audio]
Video: Flash Video 1 320x240 [Video]
Unlike the high quality video (which plays back in its original 16:9 aspect ratio), the original low quality video is also encoded as letterboxed 4:3. This is a far a more inefficient use of bandwidth, and was obviously a kludgey workaround YouTube decided upon for early versions of the video player. This has had the unfortunate side effect of being incredibly annoying for people who have widescreen monitors, as you get a picture frame effect around all videos that have an original 16:9 AR. I can't wait for the day when they fix the video player and make it correctly display widescreen videos in a widescreen aspect ratio!
Finally, watching YouTube videos through your Wii is going to be a more enjoyable experience. Enjoy :)
iPlayer gets a refresh for Christmas Day (and, I hate computers!)
0 comments at Friday, December 28, 2007...Urgh. As I write this, it's about 7:10am and I've just about (minus the audio drivers, which are proving problematic) finished reinstalling and tweaking my laptop with a fresh install of XP. Its previous lifespan was curbed rather suddenly by a total hard drive failure... Two weeks out of warranty! What a pain. Never mind, this laptop's got a 250Gb hard drive in it now. (250Gb! In a laptop!)
It had set me back a little, as all my Archive Trial drafts and images for this blog were on the broken hard drive - which I've managed to recover most of the data from, thank $deity for the one common S-ATA interface - I plugged the drive straight into my fileserver and ran GetDataBack on it for about 16 solid hours! Loads of clicks of death and horrible noises, and some CRC errors, but I got most of the important data. What have we learnt? ALWAYS keep offsite, physically-separate backups of laptop data... At the very least, a working install ISO with maybe your core apps in. I won't make the same mistake again.
Anyway, I thought I'd just observe that, in keeping with its Christmas Day official release, the iPlayer has been given some official interstitial advertising on the main BBC terrestrial channels, and the whole thing's been given a bit of a facelift:
When you download content now, the process is a lot more streamlined...Not only can you now see the more detailed statistics for each download-in-progress, details you could previously only view in the small dialog which sits by the system tray clock, but you can also enable PIN protection, see information about the peer-to-peer technology behind iPlayer, and enable/disable P2P sharing (the same option found by going to Settings and then checking/unchecking the appropriate tickbox).
When your show's downloaded...
... and after you watch it for the first time:
(Left image shows what you see after you watch a programme for the first time after download.
Right image shows the date/month info you see when you mouseover the programme's preview image.)
Below is the new iPlayer Settings page. No longer sprawled over several tabs, you have one General tab and one Parental Guidance tab. Again, neater, and neat is good. Display Options still has its own section, where you can define Accessibility options such as custom stylesheets for high-vis display or screenreader-friendly compatibility.
Parental Control has been streamlined a bit, and although I don't use it I know that I wouldn't have trouble configuring it.
If you click to view a downloaded programme, by default you get the new and improved (read: redesigned) iPlayer... player:
Below is the in-page Flash player. Most people will have to update to the very latest version of Flash to view this content, as (from what I understand) the latest builds of Flash Player support the future ability to include DRM in the broadcasts (if it's not DRMed or locked to streaming from one particular domain already!)
My favourite TV critic's show, playing in its in-page incarnation :)
Have you still not spotted the Spinal Tap homage yet? Here's a clue...
The advantage of having a Flash-based viewing alternative to downloading the Kontiki client is that you can far more easily share programmes with people, and the Flash player offers this via the button right next to the volume mute option.
The iPlayer client employs the same fullscreen method as the legion of other Flash video-based sites, using any available hardware video acceleration to do some nifty smoothing and antialiasing when you go fullscreen, and when you mouse down to the bottom of the screen, you get a thin strip of video controls, also handy for zipping through the programme without having to escape out of fullscreen then go back again.
Unfortunately the Flash method is not perfected yet, as the modal options displayed when you click on one of the left-hand-side menus (such as Categories or Last 7 Days), the entire video disappears, although it keeps on playing - and if you click out to close the modal menu, the video displays again at the point it would be if you had kept on watching normally). I'm not sure if this is a browser-specific render issue, but maybe some coding to check whether the Flash window has lost focus (and if so, pause the video, then restarting when you close any menu) would be a nice touch.
(look ma, no video!)
Oh, and the Beeb's decided to rebrand the Radio Player (but not the URLs, yet)... Everything's now under the iPlayer brand, so we are now presented with iPlayer Radio. How very black and pink of them.
So, if you're an iPlayer dabbler, check out the latest incarnation, because it's worth a look (and you may even end up watching something!) The BBC's running trails on its main terrestrial channels at the moment, including one with the Top Gear boys and one with Sir David Attenborough, and their new strapline for the iPlayer is "making the unmissable unmissable."
Personally I can't wait for the iPlayer to come to on-demand cable TV, that'll be way cooler - no chances of triggering STM on your broadband connection that way!
Joost publicise Feeds feature, platform's decent offering is totally exhausted within a matter of hours
0 comments at Friday, November 02, 2007Joost have recently publicised their Joost Feeds feature available to its users. In a nutshell, it's RSS feeds for new content. They've got a ton of 'em, too: Selected picks feeds, Genre feeds, News feeds and Forum feeds. The pick of the bunch for me from the recent updates is The Onion News Network's video feed - their stuff has always amused me, it's the perfect blend of sarcasm, cynicism, subtle humour and a good dollop of irony. Sometimes their articles have even left me in doubt as to whether what they're talking about actually has a grain of truth to it - and I know for a fact it's parody ;) Joost is worth checking out if only for The Onion's stuff.
Unfortunately, every time Joost does an ad campaign, it means that the world and his wife checks out all the content they've advertised - meaning all the new content is going to be seen by everyone, resulting in a dearth of decent stuff "you've discovered" (because hey, if everybody else has seen it before you, what gives you the cool factor edge?)
...Cynical, moi? Oh, also, don't forget that there's other alternatives available rather than just sticking with Joost, some of which aren't half bad at all. Tubecast takes the video-over-internet concept on a little differently, and the interface (whilst still alpha) is quite neat and tidy.
