High-definition video is creeping into our browsers. Today, Dailymotion began offering a smattering of videos in HD. There is nothing you’d actually want to watch—mostly a bunch of trailers for video games—other than to see what HD looks like on your computer screen. But be warned: you need two megabits-per-second download speeds to watch the streaming HD video without jitters. (I’ve got a T1 line, and I had problems).
Nevertheless, this is an important technical milestone. We are going to be seeing a lot more HD video on the Web, largely thanks to the H.264 codec in the latest Flash player. Dailymotion now joins Hulu, Veoh, and others in demonstrating what’s technically possible. But for most people, if they want to watch HD video, they still are going to have to buy a Blu-Ray DVD player.
Here is a Dailymotion clip in HD (if you don’t have the bandwidth to handle it, you will be prompted to watch a lower-quality stream, or just hit menu):
Finally! It will be only fair to skip the hd player and go directly to the web. The spoils of the format war, the people haz them.
Cool! Though I still think Stage6 has the best HD-videos on the net. I hope Youtube will join in soon…
$43M bucks and they have alot of video game videos, wahoooooo
“Your connection seems to slow to run HD…”
Nice typo.
Geez, I have been running 480p/30fps video at 800kbps and 720p/30fps at 1.3Mbps over the Web in a testbed and, so far, it has cost me under $50K. $39M? $43M?
It is Daily Motion that can’t keep up. The data rate isn’t too bad.
before they offer HD maybe they should get some higher bandwidth. I’m on a 20/5 FIOS and its telling me I’m too sow
Great… right on time for when ISPs are looking into methods of capping bandwidth heavy users
Dailymotion is at the top of my list regarding streaming video… they kill YouTube in every way except for traffic - hopefully this turns things around for them!
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com - Create Unique Memories
I’d call this HIGHER definition, not HD. It’s better than what they had before, but calling it HD is a bit of a stretch. Motion artifacts and pixelation do not an HD picture make.
I think internet speeds and bandwidth limits should be adjusted accordingly.
Come upload your HD videos on Vimeo.com right now. No need to wait for everyone else to decide to let you do it.
2 megabits per second is not enough for 720p, even with H.264 and low action.
This is like the megapixel wars with digital cameras or the MHz/GHz CPU wars. Higher numbers don’t mean better quality.
The whole package needs to be there. There are sites elsewhere doing higher bitrates with lower resolution that look much better when scaled to fullscreen.
I agree with Dalas, get on Vimeo and check these out:
http://www.vimeo.com/hd
Quality is not so great despite the 2M bitrate.
Two reasons I guess :
-> no H.264 codec here, it’s On2 VP6 (available in Flash
-> they probably transcoded smaller videos into 720p (this one http://www.dailymotion.com/vid.....5;720_auto is called 1280×720, but the real size is 640×480 - I downloaded the file)
This one’s just about worth watching:
http://www.dailymotion.com/hd/.....shortfilms
Bandwidth-wise I’m not having any problems, but unfortunately the Flash plugin under linux doesn’t seem to take advantage of hardware accelerated video playback yet…
I kept waiting for one of the cars to veer into the crowd and kill 8 people or so…
yea, why the heck don’t you guys ever mention vimeo when you talk about HD?
HD videos online is awesome. I am glad dailymotion is doing the same. Another site I noticed that recently started doing that was http://www.shareview.us.