Youtube in 4K?

Ok this is new to me but is this really 4K?

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

 

I'd read that they were going to do 4k, so I would say yes it is.

 

I hope they bring in good conversion people for "Hamster on a Piano."

 

If you take an original 4K signal, and then compress and stomp the living crap out of it to cram into a tiny stream onto YouTube, is it still really 4K anymore? To me, 4K is just a number, and there's only so much you can compress a signal before it starts looking like total crap.

By the same token: if I take a Steve Hoffman-mastered album done at 192kHz/24-bit, then I convert it down to a 48kbps MP3... is it really the same album? Only in the vaguest sense. At some point, the technical quality goes right off a cliff.

 

It is if the listener/viewer can't tell the difference.

 

That's just sad. And I like to think the people here are smarter and more discerning than that.

I always hate it when producers or networks shrug and say, "aaaaa, the audience will never notice." Part of the audience will always notice, and part of the audience really cares about this stuff. Quality is important, and image and sound quality matter.

 

I shudder to think of the upcoming 4k marketing campaign. Misinformation and downright lies to the public. Ugh.

 

Producers shoot themselves in the foot because the part of the audience that actually notices or cares are the ones that will actually pay for product. The rest who don't know or care will pirate. Why not build a good relationship with potential customers?

 

Some of the 4k Youtube video's I've seen have looked good at times when they're near static, but many of them are time lapse and full of artifacts.

 

That was not my sentiment and you missed my wider, perhaps philosophical point. I'm not talking about stuff that's had the crap squeezed out of it to obvious detrement, but, literally, if you cannot discern a perceptible difference between two encodes, even in a double blind test, then what difference does it really make? Encoding stuff way beyond human discernment is pointless.

 

The judgement call on what human discernment is is very subjective. Show me your objective data showing what people can see vs. what they can't see, and what level of compression reaches the point where nobody can see the difference. I say that that many 4K compression systems today still look like crap, judging by the tests I saw at NAB in Vegas in April. Many of my colleagues in the video engineering field (which is not my field of expertise) tell me it's worse than I suspect.

What I can say for a fact is that they can't even show regular 1080 HD on the internet with maximum quality. Unless and until we can see HD at the same level of quality as Blu-ray -- which is, in itself, already very compressed -- we're nowhere near being able to handle 4K. Bear in mind that 4K has four times the file size of regular HD video.

That is precisely the same problem I see. The picture ain't bad until it moves.

 

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If a person in a double blind experiment watches two versions of the same source - one playing in super-dooper-ultra-max quality and the other at a 'sufficiently' good quality and the person cannot tell which is which (or guesses at no better than chance), then the threshold has been reached.

Repeat the experiment with multiple subjects, including those with say above average acuity (equivalent of golden ears/eyes) and you will find your threshold. Besides which, human senses such as hearing and vision have been tested extensively and we do know objectively where the limits lie.

Case in point, this 24-bit/192kHz audio trend, which is nothing but a marketing ploy to extract more money from 'quality conscious' consumers.

 

Excuse me for saying so but I think the majority of people don't know what they're missing and might feel differently if they were let it on (a regular basis) the actual situation (as to what is possible in the medium). I think many people are unfortunately misinformed and that's the way producers want it. Easier to keep "statistics". I also think discerning differences is easier in the visual medium than audio (individual hearing and stereo set ups vary greatly. Not so much with eyesight and televisions models.)

 

I'd settle for nice 420 on YouTube.

 

Although, "stupid girls compilation" would look nice at higher rez.

 

The original source may be done in 4k (in some cases) but, no, not with the bandwidth restrictions and other issues that will exist in "translating" this to lower quality. Is a film that is transferred at 4K but then put on DVD 4K? Nope.

 

The ones I have seen look really nice when they are not frozen due to PC and/or bandwith issues.