February 22, 2008...10:34 pm
Youtube…the problem with it and why
As long as I can remember, YouTube has dominated the video hosting mecca on the net. Why? One word - Free. That’s right, anyone anywhere can upload a video to their account and have it accessible to millions of people with minutes. But what do you sacrifice for the free hosting? Quality. Because YouTube transcodes all uploaded video files, the quality of the FINAL version of your clip is substantially weaker in image resolution and overall clarity then your uploaded file.
It doesn’t matter if you uploaed an H.264, .MOV., MPEG, MP4, AVI, WMV, DiVX, etc…, because ALL file formats are then re-compressed (transcoded) into the .FLV (flash) codec. And the majority of the finalized outputs have HORRIBLE resolution with lots of interlacing and textual (graphic) artifacts.
Now its not totally YouTube’s fault. Most uploads are with consumer grade video cameras and not professionl grade (DVCAM, DVCPRO, BetaSP or D-Beta), so the field order (dominance) and overall quality to begin with is weaker. Take a weak ouput, upload it, it gets transcoded and the finalized output is now even weaker.
Not all of YouTube’s content is bad, though. Professionals studios use these guys too. They have better encoding machines (Sorenson, Telestream, Digital Rapid’s StreamZ system, Tanenberg etc…) and their uploads and finalized outputs look good - much better in comparasion then the average upload.
Also…YouTube has allowed itself to become a cease pool of questionable content and horrible user gen productions, that become viral videos. This all helps to perpetuate the YouTube phenomenon because millions of people a day flock to YouTube specifically. Its a vicious cycle!
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