Tidbit on YouTube buffering

a map of the Internet, from Wikimedia Commons

 
Last November AE Portal posted a quick exploration of How YouTube Works, which, even with a recent update on the "secret" algorithm, still left questions about caching unanswered. But actual explanations become apparent with a simple search word change to "buffering".

The best explanation of YouTube buffering mysteries was offered last summer by ArsTechnica in Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make—and break—online video, about how ISPs and video providers fight over peering agreements to "pass traffic from one to another and negotiations over caching services that store videos closer to people's homes so they can load faster in your browser." These issues will most likely be with us for awhile, given new Internet rules that will likely gut net neutrality (more from Boing Boing).

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Read more bits on YouTube buffering mysteries at PVC.

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We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

– Ken Kesey

How YouTube Works + YouTube Comment Reconstruction

How YouTube Works, posted at PVC, still has me wondering about caching, but they say more is in the works.

Not surfing the biggest swell, here's YouTube Comment Reconstruction #1, a Dead Parrot reading of music video comments, that's slightly derivative but still unexpected and funny. It's hard to see yet what effects the new YT comments system will have.

YouTube and the Alternatives

Making the Movie noted a good rundown of video hosting sites by Karel Bata in YouTube And Its Alternatives. The survey submitted a 640x480 movie and shows embedded samples at 640 and in their native sizes.

An HD survey is in the works, but Josh Lowensohn of CNET already has one ready with Which HD video Web service is the best?

Beyond hosting, NewTeeVee has put together The Best Guides to Watching TV Online.

Update: NewTeeVee says check out "sites such as Clicker, Yidio and SetJam, and that’s only the video aggregators that have launched or sent us previews in the last week" in Movie Monitor: Find a Movie to Watch Online. That’s It.

See also a previous AEP post Watching TV Online.

YouTube's live video is March Madness in Silverlight +

NewTeeVee reported that YT's live video coverage of March Madness is displayed through Silverlight, with the same embed UI and quality as/from CBS Sports. See March Madness! YouTube Gets Live Video Via Silverlight.

And Coke Zero wants you to, umm, taste the madness.

Update: Check out Alex Zambelli’s blog and Ben Wagonner (at Microsoft awhile now) who gives you some details on the March Madness web video, the Silverlight player powering it, and resolutions and data rates used. Via Andy Beach, now at Inlet, which is the first company to make use of Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming initiative.

YouTube testing paid downloads + zzizzl

YouTube is testing options that gives video owners the ability to permit video downloading and offline playing:

"Partners could choose to offer their video downloads for free or for a small fee paid through Google Checkout. Partners can set prices and decide which license they want to attach to the downloaded video files..."

There's more on Arstechnica, TechCrunch and Mashable, while Beet.TV notes that Blip.tv Pays Emerging Video Producers Well in to Five Figures.

Over on NewTeeVee, keywords (metadata) and search results are considered in The Great Video SEO Frontier.

Update: FreshDV mentioned zzizzl: The Indie film store with the unpronounceable name:

"zzizzl is a new marketplace for content creators that bills itself as the “iTunes for indie creators.” Independent filmmakers can upload their latest masterpiece and sell it in iPod and other portable media player formats. Profits are split 50/50 with the site."

YouTube: 100 tools & enhancements

Mashable runs down a YouTube Toolbox: 100+ Tools and Resources to Enhance Your Video Experience

Free Monkees 'Head' amost gone

While YouTube audio still works... from the Monkees movie Head, which was written and produced by Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson. This clip, which was like a title sequence but without titles, is cut off so the surprise cut-away is missing. For more on the script of this sequence see Mirror / Ditty Diego Changes, which looks at the shooting script and notes changes plus techniques & set-ups, characters, and obscure cinematic references.



After Effects tip: Motionworks had 2 nice tips recently...
Cinema 4D: The Vibrate Tag shows how "the vibrate tag can be used to add automatic animation and save time when working in Cinema 4D." After Effects: Looking Through Lights shows "how you can look through a camera linked to a light and see exactly what the light is pointing at, making lighting your After Effects scene easier and more intuitive."

720p: the web video gold standard

Many web video services are now serving HD 1280 x 720; we'll see how much it'll cost to stream millions more video from the cheap Christmas "flip" cameras at rates 7-10 times the original YT bandwidth. Facebook is also letting you embed on other sites now. YouTube hasn't acknowledged their HD (link/format "&fmt=22"), but they added a "watch in HD" link if the uploaded content was that size. Maybe they want to avoid Hollywood's reaction to seeing stuff in HD; see Big Buck Bunny.

Techvideoblog has a quick Online video sites HD quality comparison. He misses YouTube quality level "&fmt=06" mentioned here last month in YouTube gets HD & quality confusion, and there's tangerine in with the oranges, but I've never even visited referenced sites SmugMug or Sevenload.

Here’s an interview Robert Scoble did recently with Chris Putnam, a leader of Facebook’s video efforts, who discusses the move to a new codec and other aspects of the upgrade.

YouTube gets HD & quality confusion

Update 12-05-08: YouTube added "watch in HD" for 720p movies.

It seems YouTube does HD at 1280 x 720 now, so you don't have to use Javascript to tile 4 Youtube videos like Mr. Doob (who's also a Pixel Bender). Yesterday there was an interesting Techmeme blog swarm originating from a Kottke.org post on YouTube quality; here's an excerpt:

"I got an email from a YouTube engineer who tells me that format 18 isn't even the highest quality you can get. Check out Dancing Matt in format 22, aka 720p. Furthermore, some videos don't have a format 18 version (if the uploaded movie doesn't have sufficient quality, for instance)."

Sometimes "high quality" is HD H.264 in stereo ("&fmt=22"), or smaller (480x360, 4:3 frame aspect ratio) in H.264 stereo ("&fmt=18") or H.263 mono ("&fmt=06"). Format 22 is not always 1280x720 -- the tag is ignored if there's no HD movie uploaded, as with David Kalb vs LeBron James - Horse (HIGH QUALITY), where format 22 seems like format 06.

YouTube advice is scarce and haphazardly released. Upload advice is simply 640x480, 30 fps, MP4 with a 1 GB limit, though other sizes & formats are allowed. It seems that you should upload the highest resolution possible because YouTube saves the original upload to spin off better copies later apparently.

Download helpers, like KeepVid, Video Download Helper, GreaseMonkey scripts, Better You Tube, Safari's Activity window, etc., seemed to be a bit inconsistent in reading "normal" and the various high quality download options -- or I got confused looking at the metadata for YouTube files read by K-Multimedia Player, VLC, and Media Info (Win & Mac, via Brian Gary's YouTube Encoding: Locked & Reloaded).

Looking at Kottke's movies... it seems there are 4 formats on YouTube this morning for the Where the Hell is Matt? (2008), which has a 16:9 frame aspect ratio. Other formats for videos uploaded at different resolutions, like the download of David Kalb vs LeBron James, fall into the definitions a bit different:

normal quality
(320 x 240 @ 250 Kbps, H.263 video, audio mono 22.5 KHz)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY
file size = 11,295 KB
320x180, H.263, 344 kbps
MP3, mono, 16 bit, 22 KHz

high quality "&fmt=06"
(320 x 240, H.263 video, mono 16/44.1 at 96 Kbps)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&fmt=06
file size = 33,587 KB
480 x 270, H.263, 30 fps, 1024 kbps (total file)
MP3, 96 kbps, mono, 16 bit, 44 KHz

high quality "&fmt=18"
(480 x 360, H.264 video 512 Kbps, stereo 16/44.1 at 128 Kbps)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&fmt=18
file size = 20,784 KB
480 x 270, H.264 (3GPP), 29.97 fps, 632 kbps (total file)
AAC LC, 125 kbps, VBR, stereo, 16 bit, 44 KHz
(VLC says the file is mp4a, 29.970029, 44.1)

high quality "&fmt=22"
(1280 x 720, H.264 video, 16/44.1 KHz stereo)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY&fmt=22
file size = 75,320 KB
1280 x 720, H.264 (3GPP), 30 fps, 2296 kbps (total file)
AAC LC, 232 kbps, VBR, stereo, 16 bit, 44 KHz

high quality "&fmt=18" *B
David Kalb vs LeBron James - Horse (HIGH QUALITY)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuqiGrWBRqE&fmt=18
file size = 34,691 KB
480 x 270, H.264 (3GPP), 29.966 fps, 629 kbps (total file)
AAC LC, 125 kbps, VBR, stereo, 16 bit, 44 KHz

high quality "&fmt=22" *B
David Kalb vs LeBron James - Horse (HIGH QUALITY)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuqiGrWBRqE&fmt=22
file size = 18,098 KB
320 x 180, H.263 (Sorenson), 29.966 fps, 328 kbps (total file)
mono, 16 bit/22.050 KHz
flvsource : cdbp

YouTube Hacks: Sort, Subscribe, Listen

Liz Gaines of NewTeeVee shares LifeHacker's Top 10 YouTube Hacks.

Also interesting is Read/Write Web's take on YouTube's new video uploading platform as noted in 10 Promising Web Platforms:

"By allowing website owners to combine an on-site video publishing option for their users with the huge number of people looking to discover new content on YouTube, the platform will create a mutually beneficial feedback loop that will breathe new life into both YouTube and the web at large. It's also got potential to show up all the other big platform plays we've seen to date."

Update: From the guy that did Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us' (6.3 million views), here's 'An anthropological introduction to YouTube,' presented at the Library of Congress, June 23rd 2008.

Download YouTube Videos as MP4

Sorta repetitious but still requested... more in a previous post.

Google Operating System noted Download YouTube Videos as MP4 Files, which gives you a bookmarklet script to drag into a browser bookmark bar that you can use to easily grab the mp4 on a YouTube page.

Encode & download YouTube MP4

Google Operating System (which often looks at YouTube) explains how to Download YouTube Videos as MP4 Files, while Brian Gary explains aspects of encoding in YouTube Encoding: Locked & Reloaded at Ken Stone's FCP website.

Previous tips link, including (YouTube Tricks & Hacks) are here.

Update: By the way, you can submit FLVs that won't be reencoded if they are less than 250 kbs; set the upper limit to 246 since some encoders are often not exact.

The higher quality MP4s (AVC) are created at around 600 kbps (up from 350), 480x360 progressive, with AAC stereo 44.1 Khz at around 120 kbps.

YouTube Tricks & Hacks

Will Video for Food posted a summary of YT hints in Top Secret YouTube Tricks & Hacks. (via)

Update: O'Reilly Digital Media posted additional tips in Hi-Res YouTube Hacks, though they appear to lack knowledge of QuickTime.

Safari nets YouTube videos

There are a ton of ways to gather YouTube videos, but not all let you grab the new higher quality ones. On the AE-List, Brian Maffitt of Total Training offered a way to gather YouTube videos using Apple Safari (not the best browser), even the new higher quality ones:

"Use Safari [it works on Mac and Windows]. Open up the activity window in Safari, then load the YouTube page. You'll see the asset show up in the activity window, and it will be obvious because it's the only one that shows you streaming progress. Just double-click [or option double-click and rename the download] on the item in the activity window (you don't need to wait for it to finish streaming) and it should automatically download. You can do this with regular FLVs as well."

Update: On Windows, Control+click in the Safari Activity window downloads the file as HTML. If you then rename it to FLV or MP4, the file plays in Adobe Media Player, K-Multimedia Player, Real Player, FLV Player (as flv), and VLC -- but not QuickTime Player. Only VLC is incapable of scrubbing. When I tried the same process in OS X 10.5.1, I could download the file as HTML, couldn't play it.

YouTube quality bump

YouTube responds to Hulu with YouTube Everywhere, live video, and TiVo, but also with higher quality video according to the YT blog; see YouTube Videos in High Quality. A low quality version is also transcoded and made available to the low end, and a preference is available on the user's account.

The new spec is 480x360, up to 900 kbit/s A+V (1 GB upload size limit), but getting stereo hasn't been a sure thing. Various players think the hi-qual clips are h.263 or FLV only as well as h.264, and some of them at least won't play in QuickTime Player when relabeled as .mp4.

Wired has a handy summary of some of the work done by YouTubers who watched the transition for the last few months.

In the old system, it seems you could get stereo if you submitted a movie (FLV or other) with a lower data rate than their threshold for resampling, which is 350 kbps. According to a thread on Video Help, "if you use mencoder, this code is simply amazing for stereo audio, and often gives you a lower average than 96 kbit/s (what they use now):

-oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=2:q=8:aq=0:mode=1:padding=2:lowpassfreq=16300 -channels 2 -srate 44100"

YouTube<>AppleTV Hack

CinemaTech reports that "AppleTV users will be able to watch a selection of YouTube's most-viewed and most-discussed videos on AppleTV..." via Ars Technica and Wired.

I don't have an Apple TV box, but it doesn't seem all that easy so far. I can't tell how the ATVFiles browser plugin (plays video files without transcoding and syncing/streaming them) is different from the "A Series of Tubes" plug-in. To explore what is going on under the hood of the Apple TV, check out Apple TV Hacker and AwkwardTV Wiki.

Update: HD For Indies has further "Thoughts on HDTV DVD playback - AppleTV, uprezzing DVD player, or HD DVD player."


Update 2: On May 30 Steve Jobs demoed Flash on Apple TV which should be available as a free update in June; see Apple TV and YouTube, together at last and Macworld on All Things Digital.

YouTube Thumbnail

There's a Squidoo post about changing the poster frame of a YouTube video (the middle frame), which was mentioned briefly by Web Video Doctor in 5 Tips to Increase Your Video Views.

Will Video for Food adds: "I actually work hard to ensure that my center frame is representative of the video since I know how important that thumbnail is to views. It’s a shame YouTube doesn’t allow creators to select their frame like Revver and Metacafe facilitate."

They want you to transfer YouTube videos to DVD

What to tell friends that want you to transfer YouTube videos to DVD: "try it."

Use the Firefox browser and install the Firefox extension "VideoDownloader." You can find cool FF extensions in Firefox in Tools>Extensions>Get More Extensions.

Then load the YouTube movie click on the VideoDownloader icon and right click to save link as, but rename the link to xxx.flv (it's really Flash). If you know how the play Flash movies, great; others need something like Wimpy Standalone FLV Player. Then use your laptop's video out to play back on a TV.

Otherwise download iSquint/Mac and convert the Flash file to QuickTime. You can use your laptop's video out to play back on a TV. If you want a DVD, get iSquint's $23 sibling VisualHub, which lets you easily convert to many formats. An alternative would be Roxio Popcorn, which also shrinks oversized DVDs down to single layer size. Then use iDVD or another app to finish the job.
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