Mass media and blogosphere hysteria ensued after several ISPs (including AT&T) responded to customer complaints and blocked an IP address that was transmitting massive amounts of Denial of Service (DoS) traffic. For something as routine as and essential as blocking a malicious attack from a computer on the Internet, all hell broke loose late Sunday evening and early Monday morning because the IP address belonged to a popular image sharing site called 4chan whose members are infamous for perpetrating porn flooding pranks on YouTube as well as organizing DoS attacks against other websites.
Update 6-22-2009 – Looks like Google stopped hard drive caching on their 720P content. Ironically, that’s the content that needs the caching the most but I guess they want to keep people from snagging the 720P clips.
Update 11/20/2009 – The cache for 720P or even 1080P content is working again.
With skyrocketing bandwidth costs due to 640 Kbps “HQ” video and 2.25 Mbps 720P “HD” video, Google is getting a massive bandwidth bill every day to deliver all those YouTube videos. To alleviate their bandwidth load (and your’s), they now cache all the video content on your hard drive. Not only does this perform better, but it also makes it easier to snag copies of the videos.
To archive a copy of the videos, watch the YouTube video stream in full and then go to the C:-Users-MyUserAccount-AppData-Local-Google-Chrome-User Data-Default-Cache folder (note that the – represents backslash because I can’t use that character for the web) or whereever your browser stores its cache, and sort the files by date. Then you can see the latest large file (typically in the tens of megabytes) and copy it out of the cache folder to somewhere permanent. Then for the higher quality videos, append the file extension .MP4 to the extensionless file and make sure you have something like K-Lite Mega Codec pack installed (Windows 7 will play .MP4 files out of the box) to play the file. The lower quality videos require .FLV extensions. I’ve never seen any DRM on the content either so it works on any computer or any device capable of playing the video format.
You could already do this to a certain extent with keepvid.com, but it didn’t always work and the file you grab from the link keepvid provides is often of inferior quality. Keepvid was also unable to show you the link to the 720P content and this cache copying technique works for 720P content as well. Just make sure you don’t switch to 720P midstream because the cache doesn’t start from the beginning of the clip. Make sure you stop the stream and start it from the very beginning to cache the full copy.
This is a good test for a netbook to run to show that 720P Silverlight works on a slow netbook while Adobe Flash 720p will not. Oh and what do you know, this even plays fine in Google Chrome.
This same clip on YouTube in Adobe Flash 720P won’t work on any low end graphics chipset computers which includes the vast majority of netbooks on the market and also many lower end desktop systems with integrated graphics. Try the video below on your netbook or low-end desktop and watch it choke. I can’t even get the supposed hardware accelerated beta 10 Flash player working on netbooks.
The Silverlight clip is encoded with VC-1 compression at 2.25 Mbps and the Youtube version is 2.25 Mbps H.264. Silverlight plays fine on the Asus 1000HE netbook I’m reviewing and that says a lot about the coding efficiency of Microsoft Silverlight. To be more precise, Process Explorer shows that the Silverlight version cost me around 73 billion CPU cycles to play the full clip while the Flash verion cost me around 107 billion CPU cycles. That means 720P Silverlight barely works on netbooks while Adobe flash doesn’t have a chance. Now the Silverlight player still takes twice as much CPU utilization as the native Windows Media player application so it’s as smooth as I’d like it to be, but it could easily be smooth if the video was encoded down to 1024×576 resolution which would be more ideal for 2 Mbps video streams anyways. Maybe the Microsoft team can do some more optimizations to make the Silverlight player closer to Windows Media 11 in terms of performance.
Our fellow blogger Charles Burns asked me if this was due to the different compression algorithm being used (VC-1 versus H.264), and I think that’s part of the reason but not most of the reason. The fact that Silverlight uses VC-1 is a built in advantage, but contrary to popular misconception, netbooks can play 720P H.264 just fine. I’ve done it with as little as 45% CPU utilization on a standard 945-chipset netbook so long as I’m using something good like VLC player. Apple QuickTime player chokes but that’s a whole separate topic. The bottom line here is that Silverlight is CPU/GPU friendly while Flash isn’t.
Larry Seltzer also made a great point to me that Silverlight has been out for 2 years now and there have been no security vulnerabilities it exposes you to unlike Adobe flash which is frequently exposing us to security vulnerabilities. I think this is a clear example of why Silverlight is winning so many customers, and Adobe better do something to optimize their software because netbooks are here to stay and their market share is growing. More and more people will expect to be able to view 720P streaming video on every computer they own and not just their high-end systems.
Here’re a native Windows-only Windows Media Player version that runs on Windows systems running IE, Firefox, or Chrome. It apparently runs about 2x faster than Silverlight and about 3x faster than Flash. If you’re on a netbook or low end desktop, this is the most CPU friendly solution. In fact, it plays with only 42% CPU utilization across both Atom processor threads.
This is definitely one of the most creative short movies I’ve seen in some time and it makes use of some fantastic computer graphics. Much of the technology exists in virtual reality research today in primitive form but this video shows you what might be possible down the road and it shows it in a very artistic context.
For some reason, YouTube is not letting these clips go to high quality mode automatically so be sure to click on the “HQ” button to view it at a higher quality.
Thanks to this article from reelseo.com, I now know how to embed 720P HD video from YouTube.Here’s are some samples of videos I uploaded from my Lake Tahoe trip this week.All you need to do is add “&ap=%2526fmt%3D22″ to the source parameter.Vimeo used to be my preferred video sharing site but they only let you upload 1 HD video per week and they have a weekly cap of 500 GB. The bigger problem for Vimeo is that they don’t let you embed their videos in 720P HD unless you pay them money. YouTube used to be really poor quality and even their High Quality (HQ) mode was dubious in quality because it was only 640 Kbps. Now this new 1280×720 service which probably streams at around 2 to 2.5 Mbps is superb quality. I initially had some problems with this new service from YouTube stuttering but the problems appear to be fixed for the most part. YouTube now appears to be the king of video sharing. The only limitation that still annoys me is the 10 minute and 1 GB file size limit. Note that the video source could have been much better if I had used a real video camera instead of a point-n-shoot Kodak still camera that happened to have 720P video capability. I avoided using my Sony 1080i HDV camcorder because it was easier to put a point-n-shoot in to my pocket. I’ll try to upload something of better quality with less sound and video noise and snow storms aren’t exactly conducive to this.
What this means is that instead of those tiny blotchy 320×240 320 Kbps bitrate videos from standard quality YouTuge, you can now get less blotchy and a little higher quality from YouTube videos at 640 Kbps bitrate. I’ve embedded a video above scaled up to 590 pixels wide by 478 pixels high to make it show up bigger.
For anyone who wants to create some decent quality video, YouTube will let you switch to free director mode which removes the 10 minute time limit Google put the 10 minute time limit back in unfortunately. You can also use their new beta uploader up upload files up to 1 GB size. To get optimum high-quality uploads, I would recommend uploading at 1280 Kbps because YouTube will convert it down to 640 Kbps so you want a better source.
Now if you REALLY want some higher quality video, you go to Vimeo and upload 720p content at 3 Mbps. I suspect that Vimeo converts it to 1.2 Mbps video which they will market as ”HD” video but if you’ve been following my old blogs, you’ll know that low bitrate HD isn’t actually High Definition in quality. The actual quality is lower than DVD but Vimeo video looks great at 640 pixels wide and it’s way better than YouTube or most of the other video sites. The down side is that you have to upload 3 Mbps content which is very slow unless you’re lucky enough to have something like Verizon’s 20/20 FiOS service.
Archive for the ‘YouTube’ Category
Mass media and blogosphere hysteria ensued after several ISPs (including AT&T) responded to customer complaints and blocked an IP address that was transmitting massive amounts of Denial of Service (DoS) traffic. For something as routine as and essential as blocking a malicious attack from a computer on the Internet, all hell broke loose late Sunday evening and early Monday morning because the IP address belonged to a popular image sharing site called 4chan whose members are infamous for perpetrating porn flooding pranks on YouTube as well as organizing DoS attacks against other websites.