Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
I know it isn't a major concern to many of you (Simply because no one ever bothers HD encoding... despite the somewhat reasonably high demand for them), but YouTube has upped their time limit. A test upload can be seen here, and a TAS upload is on its way.
Anyway, considering the normal length of our encodes (From 6 to 14 minutes), this is a drastic reduction of the amount of playlists that need to be made.
I just hope this can encourage more HD encoding... "You can't have a Gaytime on your own" (Most Australians here will get a reference... the advertisement isn't uploaded to YouTube yet somehow).
Sorry for asking this, but I still can't really understand what the idea with the HD encodes is. It's not like the HD resolution adds any info to the video.
I know that I myself once started a thread suggesting HD encodes (and with 5.1 surround sound), but it was a joke. I never realized someone would actually start doing it for real.
The main reason for HD encoding is for the higher bitrate so that it looks better. Besides that, you're pretty much right, there is no extra information. In fact the aspect ratio is wrong making it look off. As for Flygon saying there is a high demand for it, I really don't see it.
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
The purpose is to avoid YV12 colourspace reduction... Bisqwit posted quite a nice explaination last night, though, my IRC logs don't have it saved, if anyone has a log it'd be wonderful. He explained it far better than I could.
The added bitrate, especially for more detailed movies (Such as Mega Turrican) is also a nice bonus. Though, understandably, people will want to watch the lower resolution modes... which also look pretty cool, so, yeah. It's also worth noting that modern HD encoding is able to forego borders completely, thanks to YouTubes Original encoding mode. Anything with a vertical resolution higher than 1080 pixels will be reencoded at its native resolution for Original mode, no scaling applied.
I'm pretty sure there is an increased audio bitrate also, but it's a minor factor.
Essentially... it looks better than if a native unscaled video was uploaded to YouTube. Personally, I, myself, would prefer if I could just have 2X scaled video hosted somewhere, but having the bitrate being reduced and such is quite a pain in the rear end. That, and I lack the computational resources to be able to encode such movies easily (Assuming no one else picks up on the act). Theoretically, a 2X scaled MP4 could be hosted on Archive.org, but, put simply, it isn't worth the effort to make a well compressed MP4 that can be streamed simply.
Or you can just upload any encode with no borders and bam, there is no borders =p
To me, that means one is just lazy, as making MP4s really isn't that hard.
By the way, since the limit now is 4k resolution on YouTube, you can fix the aspect ratio and the YV12 color reduction at the same time. For example, for NES 256x224 resolution, you could resize it to 3584x2688! How's that for huge =p
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
Uh... making a video that large isn't exactly very trivial. Especially for my Hard Drive.
And, what I meant by 'isn't worth the effort' is that the encoding settings for, say, a 512*448 to be crunched down enough to be streamed easily while maintaining near lossless quality would take quite a while to encode.
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
I tested it out earlier... the limit definitely is 14:59 or 15:00... I'd test now, but I'm at Mums. Ask around the IRC channel to hear about my situation.
Also take into account that the computing resources required for decoding (ie. playing) an MPEG-4 video is, AFAIK, proportional to the resolution of the video (although I have no idea by which function), and decoding H.264 is a surprisingly heavy operation. Which means, in simpler words, that the larger the resolution of the video, the more CPU power is needed to play it.
This can already be seen in HD resolution MPEG-4/H.264 videos, which slower Pentium 4's have a hard time playing in real-time (and even the fastest Pentium 4 struggles to keep up). Not to talk if you were to dramatically increase the resolution even further...
Not everybody has a top-of-the-line quad-core computer.
Actually the way H.264 works is that it's harder to decode the bigger the frame is. Since all high resolution videos of games are just simple resize of pixels where each pixel is now a huge block of color, compressing it is very easy for H.264. Basically what I'm saying is, going to high resolution won't take as much bandwidth as you would first imagine.
I'm not exactly sure what you are saying there. It seems that you misunderstood what I wrote. I was not talking about the bitrate or bandwidth needed for a video with a large resolution. I was talking about the processing power needed to decode (ie. decompress) a high-resolution H.264 video stream, which AFAIK increases as the video resolution increases (which is why older Pentium 4 computers have hard time playing H.264 videos which have HD resolutions).
(OTOH, I don't know if this is only for HD videos which truly have additional image information in them. It might be lighter to decode if the video consists of a small-resolution original material which has simply been scaled up...)
I am talking about processing power. All I'm saying is the huge pixels are simple to encode, making it small in size, and ALSO simple to DECODE! That's what I meant =)
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
To add fuel to the fire, my computer struggles to play the HD videos I make... particulary 1080p and Original mode.
I work under the assumption that people now use computers with 2.4GHz Quad Core CPUs rather than dinky 1.6GHz Dual Core CPUS. This is why it takes so long for me to encode stuff, I don't have the power to play back my own encodes.
However, Alexras computeer can play back my own encodes wonderfully.
Did I mention posting via a DSi is a pain in the ass?
Joined: 5/22/2010
Posts: 80
Location: WAR TOWN, Georgia (USA)
Though they did up the limit and provide HD support, something tells me they're still not good at achieving 60 frames/sec playback. They don't have the software that we got as individuals: VLC.
Do I look like someone who really cares what God thinks?!
"GI Joe: The Atlantis Factor" - May be improved in the future.
YT can support 60 fps playback, just they don't allow it/convert to it. YT playback is really flash playback and all you really see is just the frontend. 60 fps and even 120 fps is possible as shown by archive streaming.
15 min limit? Cool, I didn't know this before because the Swedish translation of youtube kinda sucks. And even if I keep changing the language to US it always changes back to Swedish again.
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11495
Location: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Current limit for movies is about 15:30+ minutes.
Uploaded some vids to work out.
15:32.0 & 15:31.5 were deleted for length, 15:31.0 was cut to 15:30, as well as 15:30.5
So this is it, MUGG
Cut movie on 15:30 + some tail of milliseconds & only this tail will be cut by YT
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.