Youtube

[Muse]

I know Youtube is huge. I don't get it. I visit threads and often see links to Youtube videos but I generally find them highly unsatisfying and I'm wondering if there's a way to improve what I see. I have a fairly high speed DSL connection (2.7 MB), but on my desktop and laptop (both pretty fast machines), I'm not getting out-the-box a nice image.

I'm used to pretty top notch video on my computer because I have an HDTV card in my desktop, which pulls in digital TV and when available, HDTV. The results are stupendous on either my 19" LCD, or as I often do with HDTV, project on a big screen with an LCD projector. In comparison, when I'm seeing at Youtube is like looking at the world through a keyhole. The tiny rectangle might be 1/2 way interesting if the resolution were better, the contrast and brightness decent, but even those always seem to truly suck.

Is there a way to see these videos full screen? I'm only getting about 1/12th of the screen real estate involved. I see a zoom, but that doesn't increase the screen real estate, it only zooms the video. What use is that?

 

[TruePaige]

The..button on the right is full screen mode.

 

[pulse8]

You're comparing an HD stream from cable or OTA to a 300k stream from YouTube?

 

[ForumMaster]

of course it may fill the screen, but the quality will still be awful. still, think that each video is a heavily compressed flash file at 320x240. and yet youtube is still probably the biggest user of bandwidth.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: pulse8
You're comparing an HD stream from cable or OTA to a 300k stream from YouTube?

Guess so. I'm doing OTA.

I didn't know there was a full screen mode. I poked around a few times and couldn't find it. I'll look again... thanks.

 

[eelw]

Looks fine on a IPod Touch screen

 

[FoBoT]

youtube sucks

 

[echow87]

^ No one cares if you think YouTube sucks.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: pulse8
You're comparing an HD stream from cable or OTA to a 300k stream from YouTube?

that's like murdering kittens

 

[ppdes]

Even full screen it looks terrible. They should start a premium version where you pay or watch ads to get the videos at as high quality as the original source material allows.

 

[randomlinh]

Originally posted by: ppdes
Even full screen it looks terrible. They should start a premium version where you pay or watch ads to get the videos at as high quality as the original source material allows.

the problem is, a lot of the user stuff source material is crap to begin with. Who wants to spend ages uploading HD material? It's bandwidth intensive and enough people obviously don't give a crap, hence it still is popular.

I'm sure that will gradually change in the future.. but for now, we're stuck w/ whatever crap people throw up there. Youtube is moving to h.264, but I dunno how much that really helps if we're sitting on tiny res files to begin with.