4K Videos Coming To Youtube

Youtube is raising the bar once again with the announcement that the video hosting site will support 4K videos in the near future. Less than a year ago Youtube enabled full HD, 1080p, video resolutions on Youtube and most people thought that 1080p was going to be the top resolution on Youtube for a long time to come.

4K videos raise the bar by running in a resolution of 4096 x 3072, that's almost four times the size of the full HD resolution.

But 4K videos raise the bar not only resolution wise. The hardware requirements to play those movies on Youtube have gone up a lot.

Youtube visitors need a ultra-fast broadband connection and a computer system capable of displaying the videos smoothly in the web browser.

First user comments in the official announcement mention that the videos are not running properly on their computer systems.

But then again, it does not make lots of sense anyway to run 4K videos on a netbook screen or on a computer screen considering that the best screen size for 4K video is 24 feet, according to Youtube that is.

Our Core-i7 860 test system that's connected with 50 Mbit
to the Internet was able to display the videos smoothly.

The test videos in 4K resolution are available here on Youtube. They are currently not offered for HTML5 Beta users, only Flash users are able to select the Original resolution to watch the movies in 4K.

We all know that resolution is not everything, a low bitrate can turn a 4K resolution video in an unpleasant experience. The sample videos seem to suffer from a low bitrate. What's your take on the 4K addition? Good move or publicity stunt?

Advertisement