YouTube and "HQ Audio"

While doing a search for Dan Hartman's "I Can Dream About You" on You Tube, I saw that the video was listed under "HQ Audio," as shown here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc3Sa4n0rS8&feature=related

Then curiosity got the better of me. Did a search. Viola!
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=HQ+Audio&aq=f

Questions:

+ Is this really HQ Audio? Thank goodness it wasn't listed as "HD."

+ If so, how long before music servers start incorporating this feature? How long will Google realize they are sitting on an untapped market and release a hardware device to compete with Apple?

+ Or, much ado about nothing?

 

That's just the poster of the video saying the audio in his version is somewhat less crappy than previous videos. It's not a Youtube feature.

 

yeah... theoretically I could post something up and append (HQ Audio) at the end of the video name


maybe I should edit these
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ38kj6UsZo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exoXXnxjgWM

 

I've felt that the sound quality on YouTube has gone to hell in the past year. Maybe it's just me, but I'm hearing compression artifacts up the ying-yang.

 

As said above, this is not a feature.

The only way to ensure you get the highest quality audio is to watch the video in its highest quality setting, using the bottom-right quality button (by default it'll say 360p or 480p probably).

 

Even at 1080p settings the sound isn't very good. Neither is the video quality, for that matter!

 

I don't think YouTube does 1080p properly. If you upload a desktop capture at 1080p, all of the text will become blurry when you watch it in 1080p mode - consistent with a resize (which shouldn't be happening).

I think 720p and 1080p videos have 256Kbps AAC audio (same as iTunes) but it of course depends on the quality of the audio in the original file.

 

I can't imagine the Youtube servers are throwing too much processing power at trans-coding to FLV and MP4 from the original video file. From the looks of the image quality (digital grain, artifacts) they must have it set to "quick and dirty" mode.

I have to wonder if a video file were trans-coded using a good quality video editor before upload if the video would look better.

 

I'm curious what the native format is that YouTube stores on their servers. There's a lotta smoke and mirrors going on there.

I think it's all some variant of H.264 nowadays, and not Flash-based, but I agree, there's a ton of processing and schmutz* going on. The 1080 looks like crap, especially when you start looking at the compression artifacts in fades to black. Hideous.

_______________________
* that's a technical term.

 

No matter what the format of the uploaded file is, it is always re-encoded by YouTube. Therefore, there's no advantage to re-encoding (as AVC 720p 2Mbps for example) prior to uploading. For the best quality, the original video should be uploaded.

 

According to the Wikipedia entry (as well as my ear), YouTube currently uses the same level of audio compression regardless of the size or visual resolution of the file. I think that the only way that you could claim HQ audio would be if the original source was lossless, and even then I doubt most are.

 

There's no way the YouTube audio I hear is even 128K. It sounds really brittle and distorted to me, and yet other sources on the web sound fine (like the HD trailers on Apple's website). I think YouTube is stepping real hard on the compression these days.

As YouTube admits: every minute of every day, 24 hours of video are being posted by users to their site. This is an astonishing amount of material by any measure. I wonder at what point they just run out of space?

I also had to laugh at YouTube's new "feature" where they claim to offer 4K video. They can't even do standard-def that isn't compressed all to hell. At some point, HD that's compressed 200:1 ain't really HD? I mean, it's the video equivalent of a 16kbps MP3 file!

 

"Schmutz" is german for "dirt"

 

Just a little video tech joke.

 

They certainly use different audio encoding for lower quality video options. There's often a very noticeable difference when playing something back at 360p and then at 480p.

I don't think most videos sound anywhere near that bad, but unfortunately VLC isn't telling me the bitrate of the audio, just the codec used.

Interesting to note that some videos still don't have a quality option and require the &fmt=18 trick for higher quality (stereo) audio.

 

The stereo stuff sounds maybe 10% better, but only barely. It's "crunchy," for lack of a better word. I hear far better quality from Sirius Satellite Radio on the net, and that ain't that great, either.

 

Has stereo always been available on Youtube? When It seems like 3-4 years ago everything was in mono, but I may be mistaken.