Youtube Upload, increase quality/control (HQ hack obsolete)

[dtfinch]

The value for the "t=" part of the first url ( http://youtube.com/get_video?video_id=wx-CZIoNPJY&t=OEgsToPDskJZ71ChIKaF2VqF55hADG3s&fmt=6 from my last post on the previous page) comes from the "var swfArgs =" line in the html, in case they've started keying it by IP or if there's a timeout or something.

[atropine]

I can see that there is a 12mb video attached to the google video link , but it won't allow me to stream or download. Well it transfers about 1KB/s, but that's a waste of time . Very strange indeed.

[dtfinch]

I checked again and only the beginning of the t parameter matches swfArgs.

[dtfinch]

You could try going to about:config, adding a value named "general.useragent.override" and setting it to "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9b4pre) Gecko/2008020504 Minefield/3.0b4pre"

Then go to the vibes video, view the page source and see if it added the fmt_map value to swfArgs. If it's there, let the video finish downloading once (you don't have watch it all) to give it a chance to update its bandwidth statistics, then refresh the page. If fmt_map isn't there, then it has to do with more than the useragent string. If it is there, but it's still low quality, then it might have measured your bandwidth to be too low. In either case, there's also that greasemonkey script I posted a while back, and adding "&force" to the url. All it does is add that missing fmt_map parameter with a low bandwidth requirement. You'll see the video box reload once after the page has loaded if it script does what it's supposed to.

[Spritemoney]

So yeah, we have a problem. The duration length hack doesn't work anymore. Any other ideas? xD

I don't know why youtube has deliberately disabled the ability to do this. It's not like this hack effected it's network in anyway. Just Because the video/audio bitrate was higher ddidn't mean youtube were sending more data at a higher speed.

I bet some non technical idiot at youtube got all upset about this, and demanded the hack be fixed, without even realising it did nothing to impede the network in any way.

Actually in FEB 2nd (2 days b4 they fixed it) it was on wikipedia

[bayme]

They flick the switch and all new content is encoded with VP6 codec and played back with Flash8 player, while old content remains to be played back with Flash6 player.

I think you miss how the YT flow goes with new video. If you flip the switch at the upload-stage, then you need to somehow make sure that all people playing back the newly uploaded video will use the compatible (newer) player for it. How are you going to separate the two at playback for the entire world and global site interface?
Just think, YT shows players almost everywhere onsite and offsite, small and large. You'll then end up with videologs on channels having to show the two different players at one time. It will be an incredibly messy procedure if you do it that way.

I predict they will change it at the player-level in 1 go. By;
- re-encoding what is already uploaded (which might take days,
and will be done on separate offline machines), then
- shutting down the upload option for the entire world's audiences for as long as it takes
to get the remaining (latest fresh) uploaded content re-encoded, then
- shut down the entire site worldwide
- switch the playback static content of the site to using the new player,
- changing clusters and matching database-entries to the new encoded videos (takes about 40 minutes as well, at least)
- voila.

Maybe if they do this they can also finally add a decent thread-layout for their video text-comment sections in the same go.

[bayme]

I don't know why youtube has deliberately disabled the ability to do this. It's not like this hack effected it's network in anyway. Just Because the video/audio bitrate was higher ddidn't mean youtube were sending more data at a higher speed.

Of course it is!
People normally using a maximum of 350 kbit/s, are now pulling out the bandwidth that would normally be used by 2 or more users within the same time. Without the hack they remain at their maximum bottleneck.

And I'm guessing, with the incredible and still exponentially growing amount of petabytes they serve, they need to calculate their bandwidth bottlenecks really carefully. Just think:
If only 100000 videos worldwide are pulling 700 kbit/s instead of the YT staff's estimated 350 kbit/second (a low estimate of what we're causing), that would already mean 100000 times 350 kbit/s EXTRA,
which is an overhead of 35 GIGAbits/sec of 24/7 traffic. Trust me, that's NOT cheap, not even today,
and something like that you *will* notice as a slowdown on all videos if they weren't prepared to serve the extra amount..

I'm not at all surprised they try to do things against this.

[atropine]

I don't know why youtube has deliberately disabled the ability to do this. It's not like this hack effected it's network in anyway. Just Because the video/audio bitrate was higher ddidn't mean youtube were sending more data at a higher speed.

Of course it is!
People normally using a maximum of 350 kbit/s, are now pulling out the bandwidth that would normally be used by 2 or more users within the same time. Without the hack they remain at their maximum bottleneck.

.

NO!!! I disagree, but that's what youtube probably thinks.

When I stream 350kbit youtube videos , the video is normally fully downloaded before i'm even half way through watching it. The speed that youtube sends out the data is a constant. The bitrate of the video doesn't matter at all as the constant doesn't change. If you encode with a bitrate too high, then you'll get constant buffering, If you encoded at around 500kbit, then that worked perfectly.

But what is important to note is that youtube always sends me data at higher than 500kbit with any video I watch on youtube. That is my point. They do not send out data at a faster speed because you're watching a higher bitrate video, and they send out no more data than would be sent for a legal 10minute video anyway.

[stsin]

Wish I looked here first, instead of wasting all that time figuring out why YT is now reconverting my files.

After finding this thread about a month ago, I uploaded some of my favorite AMVs that looks great:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7v26Q3SkaA
(I might have got carried away with the bitrate on that one, and though usually plays fine without lagging, lowered the bitrate on later uploads)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBhn8w64UtM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsFLFRS7mfY

Now that we no longer can upload high bitrate files without YT reconverting, here's some of my attempts on videos under 350Kbps (had to sacrifice a lot to put as much bitrate into each frame):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgO3CZXwg94
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEV86JOiJ_0
Though this video is already 9mins long, wish I had the extra 2 mins, which would have made this look much better. But oh well, still better than letting YT do the conversion. I regret not uploading this days ago.

I used to check if YT did any conversion by checking the frame size. Now that I'm having to resize to 320x240 to remove the artifacts, can't do that anymore and now listen if it stays in stereo since YT converts to mono.

I just use Avanti GUI with FFmpeg. Adding ffmpeg options in the 'user VIDEO options', like -padtop etc. to keep aspect ratio. In otherwords, I don't touch avisynth. But is it better to use avisynth instead? And if I where to use it, curious which filters would be helpful in making it more compressable.

[Spritemoney]

They flick the switch and all new content is encoded with VP6 codec and played back with Flash8 player, while old content remains to be played back with Flash6 player.

I think you miss how the YT flow goes with new video. If you flip the switch at the upload-stage, then you need to somehow make sure that all people playing back the newly uploaded video will use the compatible (newer) player for it. How are you going to separate the two at playback for the entire world and global site interface?
Just think, YT shows players almost everywhere onsite and offsite, small and large. You'll then end up with videologs on channels having to show the two different players at one time. It will be an incredibly messy procedure if you do it that way.

I predict they will change it at the player-level in 1 go. By;
- re-encoding what is already uploaded (which might take days,
and will be done on separate offline machines), then
- shutting down the upload option for the entire world's audiences for as long as it takes
to get the remaining (latest fresh) uploaded content re-encoded, then
- shut down the entire site worldwide
- switch the playback static content of the site to using the new player,
- changing clusters and matching database-entries to the new encoded videos (takes about 40 minutes as well, at least)
- voila.

With decent preparation such migration can be done with only (guessing here) 10 hours downtime for the Upload option (nobody can upload anything), depending on what servers they use for re-encoding, and with an hour entire website downtime (during overlap of upload downtime). It'll be worth it.

Maybe if they do this they can also finally add a decent thread-layout for their video text-comment sections in the same go.

one little problem........ Flash 6/7 is in 90% in devices (computers, wii, etc) a lot of gadgets use Flash 7, that's to blame adobe, and some computers have flash 7 still!

[bayme]

NO!!! I disagree, but that's what youtube probably thinks.

Sorry, there is no disagreeing involved here. It is fact. Science, math, you should try and learn about it.
Have you even checked the SIZE of the files you upload? They are bigger, in most cases double or more that of what it originally would be. What do you think? That added size magically transports itself to the viewers with the same bandwidth and speed as smaller files without the added part or something?
Then you have no idea what streaming video is.

[bayme]

one little problem........ Flash 6/7 is in 90% in devices (computers, wii, etc) a lot of gadgets use Flash 7, that's to blame adobe, and some computers have flash 7 still!

That's not YouTube's problem. If the OS of the user does not support a new YT player, it will require updating at Adobe, or at the brand that supplies firmware with the new Flash for the OS.
Remember, it used to be Flash 4 once, for 90% of the world.

[atropine]

NO!!! I disagree, but that's what youtube probably thinks.

Sorry, there is no disagreeing involved here. It is fact. Science, math, you should try and learn about it.

Then you have no idea what streaming video is.

Like I said, when the hack was in place the maximum data allowed was 350kbit/s x10min. So no more data was sent than for a legal 10min video. You also fail to grasp the understanding that youtube don't send out data at the bitrate of the video. A 350kbit video isn't sent out at 350kbit/s by youtube. It's sent out around the double the speed. It's a constant value not related in anyway to the bit rate of the video. This is especially noticeable when people upload low bitrate low frame rate, low resolution videos from their phones. Even if it's a 10 minute video, the data would have downloaded in less than a minute. Just because it takes 10minutes to watch doesn't mean the data is being sent as you watch. This is basic stuff

If you didn't' know that, and you still don't understand. I won't be having another conversation with you again.

[bayme]

But what is important to note is that youtube always sends me data at higher than 500kbit with any video I watch on youtube.

This is only determined by the size of the pipe, and of your internet connection, not the actual transfer of data difference. It's not a correct statement by the way, YT does not "send" you data, you pull it from them. Also, it will not be 500 kbit/s that you can pull from them at all times. YT slows down a lot at peak-times, because their pipes reach their limits almost weekly. Check, for example, this graphic:
http://www.ams-ix.net/technical/stats/cgi-bin/16all?log=totalall;png=yearly
we roughly went from 100 Gbit/s to 250 Gbit/s in 1 year time.

They do not send out data at a faster speed because you're watching a higher bitrate video, and they send out no more data than would be sent for a legal 10minute video anyway.

This is the weirdest assumption ever. Like I wrote earlier: They transfer petabytes daily. What do you think they do for that?
They need to calculate averages, carefully check the overall usage. Extra minutes is extra data, no matter how you play it.

And yes, they DO send out data at a faster speed with a higher bitrate video. They will note the over-requirement of it at least.

[atropine]

They do not send out data at a faster speed because you're watching a higher bitrate video, and they send out no more data than would be sent for a legal 10minute video anyway.

This is the weirdest assumption ever. Like I wrote earlier: They transfer petabytes daily. What do you think they do for that?
They need to calculate averages, carefully check the overall usage. Extra minutes is extra data, no matter how you play it.

And yes, they DO send out data at a faster speed with a higher bitrate video. They will note the over-requirement of it at least.

You just don't have common sense. When the hack was in place, you hacked the time so that although your video was 5mins in length, you hacked it so youtube thought it was a 7minute video and total data sent out was 350kbit/s x 7minutes. So youtube knew exactly how much data it was sending out.

Youtube Do not send out data at higher rates or lower rates depending on the bit rate of a video. For the love of god, go make 175kbit/s video and upload it, then make a 350kbit video and upload it, Then stream them both while using a bandwidth monitor to check the speed ti downloads at. It will download at exactly the same speed.

You are ignorant. I resent ignorant people having attitude with me.

[bayme]

Trust me, I know what I'm writing about.
What YT does is very smart by the way (needed to be), at times when their pipes are full or almost full (busy times), their player only pulls the required data from the servers at the time it is actually needed. It will NOT "hand out" the entire video-data for every viewer you load, it will only hand it out at the moment of actual requirement, when your viewer repeatedly demands it because the cursor is closer at the spot where the data is not in yet. Clearly, you must have seen this happen yourself at one time, or did you never notice that?

I know, it's hard to not be right at times, but honestly, you're wrong about your assumptions. They're not stupid at Google/YouTube's tech department, most of what they do is very well thought through. Every little bit of extra data on their static pages is a disastrous difference when you have as many viewers as they have.

[atropine]

Trust me, I know what I'm writing about,

I know, it's hard to not be right at times, but honestly, you're wrong about your assumptions. They're not stupid at Google/YouTube's tech department, most of what they do is very well thought through. Every little bit of extra data on their static pages is a disastrous difference when you have as many viewers as they have.

Clearly you don't know what you're talking about. I just watched the download speed of 3 of my videos as I played them on youtube. the 3 bit rates of the videos were 64kbit/s 350kbit/s & 460kbit/s . The download speed for all 3 was exactly the same.

You don't have to trust me on this, never trust a person that says trust me. Just try it yourself, and educate yourself a little.

[mohnitor]

If you have a 350 kbps file, that last 10 seconds, then download time with your 500 kbps speed will be 7 seconds. (watching 10 seconds)

If you encode this video with 500 kbps: download and watching lasta 10 seconds. So 3 seconds more download time = more traffic.

Moving a bigger file thru the net means more traffic.

Funny discussion. You have to move kb, mb, well : filesize. Speed only determines the time it needs to get into your PC. But not the trafficamount.

As you say: bitrate doesn´t matter because they all have the same download speed is so stupid, because even you must know that a higher bitrate needs more time to completely download. THAT´S more traffic !

[atropine]

If you have a 350 kbps file, that last 10 seconds, then download time with your 500 kbps speed will be 7 seconds. (watching 10 seconds)

If you encode this video with 500 kbps: download and watching lasta 10 seconds. So 3 seconds more download time = more traffic.

Moving a bigger file thru the net means more traffic.

This is true mohnitor. But due to the nature of the hex time hack, youtube see your video as being longer than it is, and so still accurately know how much data you have downloaded. The previous posters argument was that the hack impedes network performance as their statistics are no longer reliable due to the hack. This is false.

The hack did not impede network performance at all, except in saying that (as an example) your 5 minute video had the total data transfer of a 7minute video. But as youtube sees your video as a 7minute video anyway and nobody has a problem with people uploading 7minute videos that's a moot point.

[bayme]

Bandwidth in its simplest terms refers to the amount of data that flows across a network wire in a given time period. Hosting providers are charged a certain amount per month or per year for an allocated amount of bandwidth from backbone providers and data centers. True available bandwidth is always limited in a world where usage is growing exponentially, and therefore costs money.

Currently YouTube hosts about 142 million playable videos,
the average size of them is 8 Megabytes (a low estimate).

Let's say each internet user sees 2 YT videos daily (another low estimate),
this makes for ( http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm )
1319872109 times (2 x 8 =) 16 Megabytes, thus
21117953744 Megabytes of data a day that YouTube serves to the world.
That's 21 Petabytes a day.

Now, if out of the 142 million videos they host, in a short period of time,
the average size for the video rises from 8 to 8.1 Megabytes
(because of the hack, because your video takes up 11 minutes instead of the average 3),
this results in the following:
1319872109 times (2 x 8.1 =) 16.2 Megabytes, thus
21381928165.8 Megabytes of data a day in total,
an extra of 263974422 Megabytes.
That's 263 terabytes on top of the normal DAILY average bandwidth use.

To you apparently that means nothing, doesn't even exist.

To me that means an extra cost of thousands of euros a day.

You may behave like a stubborn ignorant brat all you like, sir,
but these are the facts we're dealing with here..

[atropine]

(because of the hack, because your video takes up 11 minutes instead of the average 3),
this results in the following:
1319872109 times (2 x 8.1 =) 16.2 Megabytes, thus
21381928165,8 Megabytes of data a day in total,
an extra of 263974422 Megabytes.
That's 263 terabytes on top of the normal DAILY average bandwidth use.

To me that means an extra cost of thousands of euros an hour.

Well first I take issue with your assumption that anyone was using bitrates equivalent to 11 minutes of legal data for 3 minute videos, as such ridiculously high bit rate videos would never stream, just constantly buffering. Most hacks other than for experimental purposes resulted in bitrates for videos of around 500kbit/s. This is a good bitrate as youtube servers (unless they're ill) will pump out quite a bit more bandwidth than that, so even if you have intermittent local congestion you shouldn't see any buffering,.

The other thing you have to consider is the percentage of people that knew and were using the hack. it would be in the tiny fraction of a percentage. So yes more data is downloaded if you have a 5min video encoded at 500kbit/s but considering the millions of videos and users, the extra bandwidth used (and known by youtube so as to factor in bandwidth provisos) means very little, or even nothing.

I wish you'd stop defending youtube.. They are the bad guys for removing this hack

[ricardouk]

They are the bad guys for removing this hack

I actually agree with the decision, i think people are forgeting something, the net speed of the youtube user, the net speed in my district is between 256 and 521, and not for a second i think that we are the only ones in teh world, imposing 350k bitrate insures a fluid stream with no pauses to EVERYONE even on lower connections.

Statistics say that a big percentage of people worldwide have slow net connections, i wouldn't use youtube if they were streaming 700k videos, whats the point of waiting 10 minutes to watch a 2 minute video.

by having the 350k limit everyone or virtually everyone can see a video from the beginning to the end with without stoping 10 times to cache the video.

youtube is thinking worldwide.

if you want to stream high quality videos, there loads of other services that will host your videos, without recoverting them and even give you a permalink if you want to use a diferent player to play it.

anyway people are CHEATING THE RULES WITH HEXEFYING the videos, if it was your servers/system/website being cheated would you be happy with it?

[diddyman4real]

i wanna upload past 10 minutes. i dont even care about the damn quality, just let me upload past that, thats all i want, can we all atleast work on doing that much?

[superzombie23]

i wanna upload past 10 minutes. i dont even care about the damn quality, just let me upload past that, thats all i want, can we all atleast work on doing that much?

I don't know if it's possible to do that anymore, but I was able to before the hex hack was fixed.

[Mexican001]

so, we can not upload high quality videos on youtube anymore. Thats suck!

[wwechamp]

Oh well kids! What can ya do right? If anyone finds out the next flaw in youtube then do not post it here! The Youtube team may read it. Instead we have to message in inbox. Just make sure that one of the guys wanting to know is not the youtube team pretending to be one of us lol.

[bayme]

.. never mind
(may be deleted by admin/mod)

[45tripp]

I just use Avanti GUI with FFmpeg. Adding ffmpeg options in the 'user VIDEO options', like -padtop etc. to keep aspect ratio. In otherwords, I don't touch avisynth. But is it better to use avisynth instead? And if I where to use it, curious which filters would be helpful in making it more compressable.

assuming extra filtering, yes it's better to do it all in avisynth, and sequence it the way you want.

in the first post there's a link to the general youtube discussion page,
you'll find filtering ideas there.
but basically, just degrain/smooth/deblock.

the new Avanti will have a crop/scale/pad gui page,
more clicking. less typing.

gl

[atropine]

you'll find filtering ideas there.
but basically, just degrain/smooth/deblock.

the new Avanti will have a crop/scale/pad gui page,
more clicking. less typing.

gl

The way I improve the quality of my videos, is by using dual resolution and masking. It would depend on your subject matter as to weather this could work for you. But my videos have people in them and they are what I want kept as best quality. So I have my target subjects in 320x240 resolution, and background in 160x120 resolution(upscaled). I feather between the masking so that the difference doesn't really show that much. By doing this I can use high quality stereo audio, but still have good quality for my main subject, but at the loss of resolution for background objects/scenery. You could use use a Gaussian_blur or bokeh filter instead.

[dereknp81]

Dear Sirs,

I don't think i'm crazy, or too awful newbish, but: Any Flv i try to upload is rejected.

AND

Failed (invalid file format)

This status message means that the file type of your video isn't supported by our site. YouTube does not currently accept videos in Flash (.flv) format. You may need to try using software other than the software that came with your camera, such as Windows Movie Maker (included with every Windows installation), or Apple iMovie. By opening your video file with one of these programs and then saving as .avi, .mpg, .wmv, or .mov, you should be able to upload your video with no problems.

So, have I just read 12 pages of the wrong forum post, or am I missing something? I'm not actually concerned with video quality, I just want stereo audio.