YouTube announces support for videos shot in 4K (4096 x 3072) | Hacker News Reader

YouTube announces support for videos shot in 4K (4096 x 3072)

youtube-global.blogspot.com

24 pointsabraham28 comments

It might "officially" be 4K, but it's so heavily compressed that there are visible 8x8 blocks in the images, so it might as well be 8 times smaller - i.e. it has an effective resolution of 512x384

Take a look: http://imgur.com/YFsGb.png (I didn't change the image at all, except to crop it. I used mplayer to play it directly to png, and I made it a png so it's not jpeg artifacts.)

For comparison here is the 1080 version: http://imgur.com/wkClm.png

Interestingly the png of the 1080 is twice as large as the 4k version! Even though the 4k "officially" has twice the resolution in both directions (i.e. 4 times as many pixels).

High density or "retina display" monitors should be on their way soon, I've seen a 15 inch prototype display, not sure the resolution, but it was gorgeous. It will be interesting to see how web standards evolve to work well with these resolutions.

Check their example videos:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5BF9E09ECEC8F88F

It seems since about 720p quality bottleneck is more in codec artefacts than in the resolution.

So for overall effects it would be probably better to give additional bandwidth to less lossy codec / settings than just to pure resolution (their first video "Life in the garden" has 28 MB in 720p and 91 MB in 4k resolution).

I don't have the gear to watch real 4k video properly, but watching the first video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0m1XmvBey8&feature=PlayL... ), I wouldn't consider it 'real' 4k. I bumped the res to 'original' and saw highly visible encoding artifacts on a 1080p monitor. Artifacts that I absolutely would not expect to see on 4k source RED footage, never mind 2k. It's a nice marketing number, but like buying a camera by megapixels and ignoring lens quality, it's not truly indicative of quality.

And yet they still limit videos to 10 minutes for some reason.

I would guess the answer to the time limit is the h.264 royalty license.

The 10 minute limit is to make uploading episodes of TV shows more annoying [1]. It has never been a technical limitation.

[1] http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2006/03/your-15-minutes-o...

Unless you join their premium program, the link for which, sadly, is broken.

http://www.youtube.com/premium_register

Now we just need monitors, rather than projectors, that can actually display 4K content at its native resolution. Every LCD panel I've seen tops out at 2560x1600.

They don't make them anymore :-( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

native resolution of 3840×2400 pixels (WQUXGA) on a screen with a diagonal of 22.2 inch (564 mm). This works out as over 9.2 million pixels, with pixel density of 204 pixels per inch (80 dpcm, 0.1245 mm pixel pitch)

Yeah they do: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/562026-REG/Astro_Desig...

They cost a fortune though, like $50k+. Such hi-res monitors are only used for radiography and film at present.

That has a 4K resolution, but it's 56"--that's only ~91 DPI.

While true, you're not holding the display a foot from your face like you would a cellphone.

They do exist, they're just crazy expensive. They tend to be used for medical imaging and similarly specialised applications.

Quad HD 3840x2160 prototypes have been shown, so we're getting close. Once 3D becomes a standard feature, TV makers may have to adopt quad HD to keep margins up.

And gigabit internet access.

I've got a 2560x1600 monitor, and honestly, the 4k video looked worse to me than 1080p. Blocky all over the place. If they can't raise the bitrate on the 4k videos, there's really no point to it.

Can't wait to see my first 4K cat video.

I'm sure somebody out there is shooting his home videos with RED.

This has real applications. Take a 4K video of your cat, send it to some mechanical Turks, and they'll tell you if your cat has fleas.

Pure marketing stunt. Most Blurays are probably higher quality even if they are "only" 1080p. But they have bitrates hovering somewhere between 10 to 20 Mbps, while YouTube apparently uses <1Mbps even for 4k.

Incidentally it could be interesting to see some kind of visual quality vs bitrate vs resoltion -chart, ie what would be the optimal resolution for some bitrate.

So at "4096p" the number refers to the horizontal res but at 720/1080, it's the vertical? Oddly inconsistent.

How can you possibly monetize this? 5 times the bandwidth/storage (rough guess) and all the extra information is wasted. It seems like a weird play.

Unless the idea is that when people have 4k displays, YouTube will have a tiny expensive back catalog.

YouTube wouldn't be what it is if they kept wondering how they'd monetize free video on the web. First they experiment, then they expand, then they take over. Even if money does not follow directly, it will eventually make its way into Google's core product: Adsense.

Youtube is pushing out of its niche and wants to become the place for storing and sharing any kind of video on the internet.

Note that Google has storage to burn, they've mastered high availability clustered network storage at a cost per gb far lower than the rest of the industry, they might as well try to use that for leverage. Also, google is a backbone internet provider, they don't pay for bandwith the same way that Microsoft or Apple might. Youtube bandwitch may cost them nothing, and even in a worst case scenario it only costs them rock bottom wholesale rates. Again, they're way ahead of the competition, so it makes sense for them to push.

So if I'm understanding this correctly, its a move to populate the site with high rez videos, so in a few years (or more) when monitor resolutions catch up, the site will be full of high rez content to watch?

Every time they have more disk space or bandwidth, they find a way to use it.

I'm certain they have the disk space. I'm not certain they have the bandwidth (or at least the correct buffering algorithm).

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