-
LAB
-
LIENS
-
RECHERCHE
Accueil - YouTube chooses Flash and MP4 for its higher quality videos
Dernière révision :
YouTube chooses Flash and MP4 for its higher quality videos
The first news of the day is that you can now officially watch videos with a higher quality on YouTube. Not High Definition videos, but videos encoded at higher quality, better bitrate and better resolution.
The second and really good news is that Youtube chooses Flash Player in its last version (at least 9.0.115.0) as video player for its MP4 video format. It will enforce the last Flash player version penetration, and show users that Flash could play as good quality videos than other web players.
UPDATE : Sorry, but it seems that for the moment you have to append &fmt=18 at the end of the url of the web page of the video you're watching in the address bar of your browser to have the video in MP4 format. It seems that appending this parameter asks the server to deliver MP4 and not FLV.
Sadly for the moment higher quality videos on YouTube continue to be old Sorenson FLV for people not playing with this parameter on the url... sorry for any unwanted buzz.
At least we can hope that YouTube will enable MP4 streaming for everyone having the last version of the player soon. I'm personally convinced they will do it because if you visit the video page with the &fmt=18 parameter and that you not have the last version of the player they already detect that you don't have 9.0.115.0 or better and you can't view HQ version of the video, nor MP4 version.
In the video I give as example above the video can be watched with two quality :
Low quality :
- FLV sorenson
- 320x240
- 30fps
- 253kbps
High quality :
- AVC1, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
- 480x360
- 30fps
- 429kbps
YouTube higher quality videos are clearly not HD, but are really pleasant to watch.
It could be even better if YouTube really publishes High Definition videos for Flash player, because for the moment users associate Flash Player with poor quality videos. Here in France, it's worst the case. Our national video provider DailyMotion has announced offering real high definition videos with real HD resolutions, but users all think that Flash is not fitted for HD because videos on DailyMotion are FLV ON2VP6 and not MP4. It's why YouTube high quality video with Flash and MP4 is a really good news.
Comments
Smith, are you talking about DailyMotion On2VP6 problem ?
On YouTube, MP4 files are well played while downloading, so there is no problem to progressive download MP4 files with Flash Player 9.0.115.0.
If I well understand the article you link in your comment, there is no problem to progressive download MP4 file if the header of the MP4 is at the beginning of the file. YouTube seems to do it well.
There is a tool called QTFastStart http://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk/tools/qt-faststart.c?view=markup that will put your headers at the beginning of the file.
BTW, that shouldn’t create trouble to the progressive download anyway…
What is bad IMHO is that the youtube player doesn’t seems to support the so-called php streaming technick that worked with plain o’ flv files.
Someone on this ? 
One of the reasons behind this move was the YouTube client on the iPhone. As the iPhone does not currently support Flash (as it has an ARM processor that Adobe have not ported Flash to; despite all the people moaning about Apple “keeping Flash off the iPhone”) YouTube began converting the videos to H.264 form from the original source uploads. For quite a while now iPhone users have “enjoyed” better quality video on YouTube. Similarly the BBC iPlayer uses H.264 to stream to the iPhone when it is detected.
So, YouTube using H.264 isn’t new; the only addition is that they’re now giving non-iPhone users the opportunity to see the higher quality movies.
Oh, and it was also for use on the AppleTV… anyway, good to see better quality video on the web as FLV is well past its sell-by date in terms of picture quality.
erixtekila > the youtube player doesn’t seems to support the so-called php streaming
You’re right, I’m curious to know if it can work with the implementation of the MP4 decoder within the last Flash player.
@lan > The news is not that YouTube uses H.264, but that they continue to use Flash Player to read H.264, even if the penetration of the only version of the player able to read it is not at its best for now. It tells that YouTube trust this technology.
@Tek > I’m curious to know if it can work with the implementation of the MP4 decoder within the last Flash player.
This is not a problem coming from the decoder, but more a fact that neither nobody produced a way to give the time offset of a h264 file nor included that info in the files headers. Cheers.
On more thing to note : Dailymotion did a great work of usability with their new player.
This is not the case of youtube : take a look at the progressive red bar and the gutter in fullscreen mode 
@Erixtekila > Exact … I thought to problems to change position of the playhead because of the different types of frames within MP4 (B-Frame, P-Frame, I-Frame) compared to FLV. But each call to the file asks to regenerate an entire MP4 file with the appropriate header for the MP4 slice asked to play. It must work. I’m now curious to know if the server solution you’re talking about is harder or easier to code than for FLV. 
i am working on playing video while it is Downloading and video format is 3gp i am able to play first part of stream (200 kb) but not able to play next part of stream may be that it losses headers information.
all above is done using HTTP.
how can we append header information in second Part of stream pls help me.
Thanks
vijay patidar
Hi,
Yes really good news but i recently understood why H.264 is not yet used.
When you encode a video in the MP4 format , headers are in the end of the file. So you can’t do progressive download with flash with this kind of video.
Event adobe products like premiere or after effect don’t put video headers in the beginning of the file !
All is here : http://www.scottgmorgan.com/blog/index.php/2008/01/23/why-is-my-pro…