Thread: YOUTUBE HACK: How to watch ANY VIDEO in HD on YouTube!

Originally Posted by Wurzzzz

My common sense said this was impossible...

Originally Posted by hadji

Placebo.

The video is encoded at the time of upload. They cannot undo the encoding and make it look better, especially by adding something to the end of a url. There would have to be multiple encodings done, and all of them stored, all the time.

They retain an archive of the source and re-encode it...

Originally Posted by a weakling spaz

They retain an archive of the source and re-encode it...

And this is documented where? And you really think it gets reencoded on the fly, as it streams? It takes 15 minutes for the smallest of videos on youtube, let alone anything long. And that's to the crappy-assed bitrate they use now. Never mind something that is of high quality. Hell, the actual HD samples out there can't even stream fast enough to keep up, let alone encode on the fly.

Come on. Simple logic dictates this even without experience encoding your own video.

it werks

Originally Posted by hadji

Originally Posted by a weakling spaz

They retain an archive of the source and re-encode it...

And this is documented where? And you really think it gets reencoded on the fly, as it streams? It takes 15 minutes for the smallest of videos on youtube, let alone anything long. And that's to the crappy-assed bitrate they use now. Never mind something that is of high quality. Hell, the actual HD samples out there can't even stream fast enough to keep up, let alone encode on the fly.

Come on. Simple logic dictates this even without experience encoding your own video.

They're not re-encoded on the fly. I have plenty of encoding experience, so spare me the lecture. If you're as much of a smartypants as you think you should be able to google this and find some news about it.

http://cybernetnews.com/2008/03/12/w...os-by-default/

Not youtubeHD, thanks. Learn the difference.

THIS is youtube HD, with stereo sound.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=djNZ93DvLIw

Now please.

To say the least. The original video is just a normal video that has a basic youtube option turned up. (Re: http://youtube.com/video_quality_settings ) The appended argument is just the toggle for that option.

youtube stores the original, and then encodes it to multiple formats to accomidate multiple viewers and quality targets. It does not do this in real-time.

FYI This is also how the iphones have native youtube support. iPhones do not support flash, and they only support video in a h.264 encoding, which means you normally wouldn't be able to watch youtube videos. However, youtube has been re-encoding various videos into h.264, and the iphone simply streams this version of the video.