Okay Geek Farm
YouTube rolls out 4K video streaming - brings high resolution excitement
Brandon Davenport
YouTube has finally taken the plunge and decided to join the movement of un-necessarily high quality video. What I don’t get is the point. I usually watch YouTube videos in a video box the size of my palm, and when I blow it up to full screen — well… this is where it starts to loose me.
Now, watch this Video - View in 4K here
How to turn on 4K - Click the button that says 360p and then change it to Origional
For those of you that don’t know what “4K” is, it’s a new standard in high-end HD video with a horizontal resolution of 4096 pixels (1080p has 1920 pixels). This is a big step for YouTube, and for online video overall. This is the very first time 4K video is publicly available in your browser and at a reasonable speed. The video above is a good example of the quality your going to get, and the strain it will put on your system.
The video quality however, is not great (even at 4K) when viewed full screen. There is a noticable amount of video artifacts and overall its a sorry excuse for even 1080p (which isn’t great on Youtube to begin with). Youtube has never been known for its “amazing” video quality, but they have been known to stream HD videos very smoothly on even low-end machines. I watched this video on a Core i7 PC with 4GB of ram on a 15Mbps internet connection and it played smoothly with no “buffering” messages, but the mind-blowing quality was not there.
I am being a little nit-picky, but the 4K online video thing is far off from being a reality. None of you will ever watch 4K video online, until you all have 4K monitors — it’s sort of like saying you watched a 1080p HD video on your iPod nano and bragging how great the video quality was — it just doesn’t make sense.
I can see Youtube 4K video being used in schools (projectors) and some other stuff (I honestly can’t find any other reasonable use for this) but until household computers have 4K monitors/TV’s, 4K video online is just going to be an epic science project. Stick to the 720p or 1080p for now…
More info about the 4K project | Video playlist of 4K videos
