YouTube in "HD" is Coming to Your Living Room Soon

LOS ANGELES -- Here at Digital Hollywood yesterday, HP announced that YouTube clips would be made available on the soon-to-be-released MediaSmart Connect digital media receiver. 

The box acts as a connection between multiple PC's and Macs around the house to television sets.  HP is squarely taking on Apple TV with the new device which will be shipped in June.  The retail price is not available.

Yesterday at the show, I interviewed Carlos Montalvo, vice president of marketing and services, Connected Entertainment Business, HP.

Similar to clips on the iPhone, this is not the full YouTube offering, but specially curated channels by YouTube for the new service.  The channels offered through the box will be high quality, encoded in H.264, not HD in the true sense, but the files will look good enough to blow-up on the big screen.

If you haven't noticed, the quality of YouTube clips is getting better as the transition to encoding via H.264 is pervading more of the content. Our Beet.TV channel on YouTube is looking very good.

If you want your videos to look better on YouTube, work on your encoding and you can upload giant files as big as 1 GB.  If anyone wants to share their advice on the best encoding, file format and bit rates for YouTube, please comment below.

-- Andy Plesser

Comments

[Jackson West]

Small note -- the release says that the box will play YouTube clips on an HDTV set. It doesn't say that the clips themselves will be in HD, as strictly defined as 720p or 1080i.

why are you not talking about on2?

[Keith]

Hi Andy: BTW, I really like what you are doing.

Regarding encoding settings - I am rolling out a niche video blog for wood enthusiasts. The primary site is at www.woodtreks.com, but I did a test upload to YouTube of one of my site's videos. I had already encoded a relatively hi res version for embedding on my primary site, but I uploaded this same version to YouTube and was surprised to see it that it was encoding and available as an optional "high quality" video on YouTube. The quality was outstanding. If you want to see a sample on YouTube go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YkNA24s4Ho.

This video was encoded directly out of Final Cut using quicktime conversion. It is a seven minute video that ended up at about 750MB after the encode out of FCP. I used the following settings:

export as quicktime movie
compression type - h264
frame rate - current
key frames - every
quality - best
data rate - automatic
encoding - multipass

Check out the sample video and I'll think you'll be amazed by the quality including. (BTW - rendering text has been difficult in the past with flash, but they have done something to fix that. Take a note of the text quality in the opening sequence).

Good Luck

[Keith]

I just noticed that the link to the YouTube video I just mentioned in the previous post is at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YkNA24s4Ho

(a "period" got put on the URL in error) I hope that the link above will work for you.

Keith
http://www.woodtreks.com

[Frank Fulchiero]

Here are the most thorough directions I have seen, so far, for encoding for the YouTube High Quality videos:
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/you_tube_redux_gary.html