The Mysterious High Definition You Tube Specification

You Tube ! No matter how you feel about its ubiquity or cultural significance, it is a huge factor in the video production community. Lately, it seems that about 75% of our work has You Tube as one of its delivery channels; often its the primary channel.

Have you noticed You Tube is also in HD? (Or as they call it, HQ).   This is part of the great convergence of computers and television that has been going on for over a decade now.  And with You Tube in HD, the image quality is actually good enough to watch on a large (say 40 inch) flat screen TV.  Combine this with the plethora of devices just now hitting the market to facilitate the convergence and enable you to watch your Internet media on your TV, and you just may be seeing the beginning of the next media revolution.

Here is a typical scenario: we have a client, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.  They have staged the world’s largest Poetry Festival every other year for over 20 years.  Their aim has always been to bring poetry to a mass audience. As a part of this, there have been several PBS series produced from the festival (with Bill Moyers as host)), and a radio series for public radio that we produced.  Now that the festivals have ended and there are no more television series to be produced, The Dodge Foundation has asked us to create short You Tube segments from the existing multi-camera HD footage of the festival. We have been doing this for about a year. The segments have been well received and the feedback has been universally positive.

The Dodge Foundation seems to have caught on to something: they can reach more people with You Tube than with almost any other medium.  The audience is now global and the videos can be viewed on demand.  This vastly increases their utility as teaching tools.  This is something the Dodge Foundation always wanted, and now they seemed to have achieved their goal.

But wait, there’s one missing link: HD for “TV in the living room” playback. This is where the mysterious You Tube HD spec comes in.

You Tube makes the specification available to enable videos to be created that will be in HD (or HQ) when played back.  But the spec is very technical, and You Tube is a bit fickle.   If it doesn’t like the encoding of a video intended to be in HD, it simply posts it as standard definition.  Very mysterious.  But wait, there’s more and this is the key point.

Once a video is posted on You Tube IT CANNOT BE TAKEN OFF THE SITE.  If You Tube doesn’t render the video as HD when you upload it, that’s it.   You will never have another chance to post that video in HD (and realize the future benefit of the great convergence).   Making things even more challenging, You Tube has molded itself as such a web-centric organization.  It is completely impossible to communicate with a real live person anywhere in the company by any way except email.   And the results you get from email communication are not always helpful, to put it mildly.

Can you tell that this is a well worn path that we have traveled?   It is.  But there is good news to be told here.

We cracked the code!  We solved the mystery of the High Definition You Tube specification!  No, we didn’t find a Rosetta Stone or even a technical paper on Google.  We did it through trial and error by creating a private You Tube staging and testing site.

We can now make videos for our clients in HD (HQ).

They look great.

If you want to see the results just go to You Tube and put dodge poetry festival 2008 in the search query. The result will be an entire page of our work.   Play one, and look for the HQ button in the lower right corner.  If you see it, click it and the playback will switch to HD.

The mystery has been solved. Let the convergence begin.