High Quality Without HD: A Fair Marketing Ploy In A HD Age?
Duncan Riley
34 comments »
Ive had an interesting conversation privately in the last couple of hours in relation to my previous post on YouTube looking to provide HD videos. The contention comes down to exactly what was meant when Steve Chen of YouTube told CNet that “high quality” videos were coming to YouTube.
Liz Gannes over at NeeTeeVee contends that high quality doesn’t mean HD, and argues that the context of the quote is YouTube simply providing a higher quality video than they are currently doing. Gannes noted that levels below 720p can be “high quality”, but not high definition, and yet I cant help than wonder; isn’t high quality in a HD age really high quality, quality at the top of the spectrum of choices? Is marketing a service as “high quality” when it’s not HD somewhat misleading to customers when they would naturally link to two?
The exact format of YouTube’s “high quality” video offering is yet to be seen, but given the growing number of competitors now offering HD it would certainly be strange of YouTube to ignore HD as an option in the future. Bandwidth still limits accessibility to all but no one is arguing that HD isn’t where all content is eventually heading. YouTube still leads the market by a long way, but standing still (not providing HD) as the market evolves around it would not be a good long term strategy to maintain this lead.
Update: Liz has a post up on this now here.
Update 2: pointed out to me that 480 is generally termed “standard definition” which you’d presume wouldn’t be at the top of the high quality spectrum either. Perhaps the problem is a need for a set of standard definitions.
The HD term is overused right now - just like ’sustainable’ (ugh).
YT is right not to use it. Bump up their quality for now, and when the masses have gone HD, YT can surpass them with a sweet new level of quality!
I would actually argue that “high quality” in terms of web video is actually something significantly better than the postcard sized video we currently see on most sites but may not be HD. Streaming video is not the same as buying physical media and I expect people realize that it will not be quite as good for a while yet. HD has some pretty specific terms around the quality and at least in New Zealand “high quality” isn’t one of them. 576p up to 1080p are the defined standards, hig quality is such a generic term I don’t think it can be used to define a standard of any sorts.
Glen
maybe the solution is a clearer set of standards when it comes to wording. 480p here (in Australia) for example is generally regarded a “standard definition” suggesting standard quality.
> but no one is arguing that HD isn’t where all content is eventually heading.
Wrong. I am.
The basics here are as follows:
HD is essentially a marketing ploy to sell TV sets to a saturated market. That’s not to say that it isn’t nice stuff. But SD quality is already pretty close to what the human eye can resolve at the recommended viewing distances from any screen (subtending a 30 degree angle from the eye).
What you see as fuzz with SD, particularly when run as side-by-side demos against HD (HD vendors love doing this) is mostly a factor of compression artifacts. Look, MPEG2 SD is cranked out at 10Mbps max from DVD — usually closer to 4Mbps, and typically even less than this when transmitted as a TV signal. MPEG2 HD on the other hand is close to 20Mbps.
Have you ever seen a fair side-by-side comparison of SD v HD where both are MPEG2 at 20Mbps? Thought not.
Incidentally, professional HD engineers have told me that if it were up to them they’d love to keep the 20Mbps for MPEG2 — but they wouldn’t use it for higher resolution! They’d run more frames per second and get much more fluid movement. (If you know anything about interlacing you’ll realise that a similar principle of trading frame rate for resolution is at work).
But forget all that. The premise about where content is headed is deeply confused about the difference between original and transmitted data. By all means STORE your source as HD (although my engineer chums would much rather you used the space to store SD@150fps), but TRANSMIT at a bit rate and resolution appropriate to who, how and what you’re bunging it out to. And in 2007 (and for a good fews years yet) SD is absolutely fine for YouTube.
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Chris
What a load of nonsense. You show lots of ignorance in this post. Not withstanding streaming costs, but the number of people who would be not able to watch it as the computers are too slow, not withstanding the hard drive space requirements, not withstanding extra processing CPU time for the codecs to be made, not withstanding the increased upload times for content creators, not withstanding the extra software creators would need to output HD, and edit HD.
What you talk about is all bolox! Someone should fire your arse for this post alone.
4 + 5
Tell that to the many, many startups already operating or moving into this space. Elegance: computers can play HD content right now…we might not all have the best bandwidth for it but this is changing.
You really believe that HD isn’t the future? Interesting
“Have you ever seen a fair side-by-side comparison of SD v HD where both are MPEG2 at 20Mbps? Thought not.”
Better than that Chris, I’ve got a 1080i TV that gets FTA TV channels at both SD and HD, so I can compare the two (channels here broadcast on analogue and SD + HD on digital)…hmmm….HD amazing, SD, ok, but without the depth and quality.
We’ll be seeing a standard definition set for phrases like “high quality” as soon as we see them for other words, like “gourmet” and “luxury” and “exclusive” and “best in class” and …
It’s a reporter’s duty to drill the PR folks on what they /really/ mean when they throw out these meaningless statements and not jump to their own conclusions when reporting to the public.
@Duncan
> Better than that Chris, I’ve got a 1080i TV that gets FTA TV channels at both > SD and HD, so I can compare the two (channels here broadcast on analogue > and SD + HD on digital)…hmmm….HD amazing, SD, ok, but without the depth > and quality.
Er, OK. So you’re either comparing SD analogue with HD digital, or SD at around 5MBps with HD at around 20MBps. I don’t see why you think this is “better than” a side-by-side comparison of SD and HD, both at 20MBps.
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Chris
8 - AT Duncan
It seems to me that you have missed the point that 4+5 are making. Also what is with all the anger Duncan?? I thought your forum was to encourage debat and 4+5 are making some were valid points that you seem to have fogot about in your post or maybe you weren’t aware of?
Also Duncan - Congratulations on you home set-up (you must be very proud) - But is all about what format/compression/codec that the content owner gives you. If you have bad source - not even the most expensive display technology can make it better. So with your very ‘impressive’ home set-up there is no way you can make a fair comparison unless you know what the source is.
Stage6. offers the best online streaming services on the internet. It will not get better than this. Divx, and xvid codecs are as good as it gets for online streaming. People only care about quality to the point of ‘decency’. Geeks with nothing else to spend their money on (the high fidelity audio crowd are a good example here) might well want to wast thousands on gold plated connectors and valve amps, while they nonsense around the demo room listening to classical music pumped out of audio equipment that costs 5KUSD Plus. But these people are NUTS. I used to work in an audio store selling hifi. Most of these people couldn’t tell if it was in mono, let alone anything else, yet they get swallowed in with a bit of EQ and warmth put on the sound and their hooked. (You must be one of them).
Dont get me wrong, I then graduated and then designed highly successful audio products for 8 years (DJ mixers) in that role I was fanitacial about getting the best quality (sig / noise ratio and cleanest possible signal) with the most elegant equipment. So to go geeky on you, we would use op amps that were not the standard TL072, but rather the NN5532 which had 20 db+ better sig / noise, and regulated power supplies, that gave super flat rails.
But in no terms would (as a designer) would I go down the road of high fidelity crowds nonsense, because that would have been the end of the business. You make products that are elegant that can provide the best bang for the buck and you pull out the stops to find elegant solutions to massive problems.
One side note, we used to do the mono test (for a laugh) all the time and invite ’sound engineers in to test equipment) to test them we would run the output in mono, you know how many of them ever noticed? NONE. One more laugh for you, the amount of trade fairs I went to and waling past the competitions stands, the amount of them that had the speakers out of phase was simply impressive.
Back to online steaming, I now run doc-film-net one of the authority documentary steaming sites online and I can assure you, that HD is not where anyone is heading. Currently Youtube are using On2 VP6 codec, which is ok but cains resources, thus youtube will not play on macs (I know your a mac man now) that are 400MHz or less. In contrast Google are using a standard flash codec that plays on almost anything and in doing so, they are able to lift the 10 minute (or what ever it is) limit that you tube imposes. What is the point of higher quality if you cant even watch a full length film?
Chris
digital SD…not the analogue stream and presented at 480p, we have all three.
El
I’ve seen it with my own eyes…and yes, you can upscale a DVD (my DVD player upscales ;-p ) but it’s still not the same. Is it a marketing ploy for us to consume more? Isn’t every new technology? 
When people call on me to be fired, you believe this is reasonable debate? HD is the future, maybe not tomorrow or next year but certainly it’s a direction we are heading in. Are there limitations for online delivery: hell yes, I’ve said this a couple of times now, on this post and the last one, but that doesn’t mean that we are not moving in this direction. I also don’t buy the HD sucks argument either: pure, glorious HD 1080i is just amazing. As for codecs, fairish point, but it’s all streamed from the same tower so I’m thinking that it’s pretty close. Walk into a department store and ask them to play a standard DVD vs blueray and tell me you cant see the difference
I spent a lot of time compressing DVDs for “research” purposes and came away with these thoughts which still apply
1. Video is a mess
There are dozens of “standards” for resolution, bitrate, compression algorithm, aspect ratio, FPS, key frame frequency etc. Which, in the long run, means there are no standards worth speaking of.
2. Getting “High Quality” is Hard.
When you have a limited space or limited bandwidth to work with getting a really *good looking* video takes careful hand tuning of all the above factors. Just throwing resolution or bitrate at it is not enough, (i.e. high motion scenes are a totally different animal than slowly changing shots as are low light scenes from well lit ones).
3. Quality trumps size
As long as compression is way down near the lossy end of the spectrum it’s much better to just add in pixel information to improve quality than to increase the dimensions your small amount of information has to fill. I can make your 1080i video stream at 1kbps but its just going to be one big gray pixel. You want *density* of information not just image scale.
So I hope they ignore all the HD standards junk and stick with making video look good.
-Ian
Too bad TC ignored vimeo. They launched HD (720p) in October, I saw a presentation at the NY Tech Meetup earlier this month.
http://vimeo.com/blog:70
@Duncan: Not every new technology is a ploy to drain people’s bank accounts. Sometimes it is useful, and sometimes not. You are always so quick to generalize - is everything black and white to you?
It is a fact that all those HD TVs that were sold before the Worldcup (2006) are utter crap and most of what TV suggests is HD quality is HD-lite at most. Depending on how you receive it (Air, Cable, …) there is compression to it which is hardly lossless.
“When people call on me to be fired, you believe this is reasonable debate?”
Yes lets have a reasonable debate about whether you should be fired and whether I should take your place….:)
the next gen of adobes flash player will support MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC).
That will improve image quality significantly without using more bandwith, i am sure thats were its going in online video.
If YouTube meant HD, I think they would’ve said HD. And if HD means HDCP then I don’t want it.
I read somewhere a while back that YouTube have been encoding videos uploaded in both the flv format and the new h.264 format as well. This as kayoone says is a much more efficient codec and provides far better video quality with the same bandwidth.
By encoding the videos in h.264 they are ready for when Flash Player 9 is released in a month or so. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what they are referring to and when the next flash player is released we will see a jump in quality.
Just found where I read it. YouTube on the iTV uses the h.264 encoded videos.
http://www.ilounge.com/index.p.....h264-deal/
They didn’t just do it for the iTV, its for flash player 9 as well.
@Duncan
>Walk into a department store and ask them to play a standard
>DVD vs blueray and tell me you cant see the difference
I don’t get the impression from any of your replies that you understand the fundamental point: the difference you are seeing between HD and SD is primarily a function of bandwidth and compression artifacts.
To recap: HD MPEG2 is doing around 20Mbps. DVD MPEG2 is doing 10MBps absolute max, and probably more like 5Mbps. I’ve been present at an engineers’ test of HD versus SD streamed at the same (~20Mbps) bandwidth. It is extremely hard to discern the difference without getting up close to the screen.
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Chris
@12 Duncan.
I agree that HD is great and that we are moving in that direction I think most people posting would agree to some extend to that theory.
@Duncan’s Department store Rant: Chris Bidmead is right is is all about the quality at source HD MPEG 2 is running much higher that normal DVD. And there is no way you can see a difference if the source comes from the same good quality file. You need to compare like for like -(Chris mentions HD vs SD at 20 Mbps) not just about going into department store and look at the big screens and the glitzy tech.
HD will be used where it is most effective. For UGC like youtube you would still need the orginal source in HD otherwise transcoding DV 5 Mbps into HD MPEG 2 (or other HD formats/codecs) will not provide any additional quailty to the image. It would just take up more storage and more bandwidth to deliver. So what would be the point in that? In this way yes it is a marketing gimmick. At least until the majority of youtube users have HD capacity on their mobile phones and camcorders. Then it is an infrastructure question whether youtube can actually support HD for all users.
- For large production HD is definitely coming on strong. Look at sports, film TV production and Live acts. These are the areas where people might want to see high-end production values. So it is about setting the technology into the right application. If Hulu/Amazon has the balls for HD then that could be interesting from a Net perspective.
Re: Fired debate- you need to grow some thicker skin. Don’t let it bother you
HD is the forcefed future, you’re right Duncan. But for anyone who has gotten laid this year, the improvement in quality isn’t worth replacing your entire DVD collection. HD is a holy grail for geeks and for the rest of us only useful for pro sports.
The switch from magnetic to optical was compelling; it was a no brainer. HD, on the other hand, would never succeed organically. Thank goodness it’s practically government mandated.
They have been quoted as saying HD but I think what they really mean is “high quality”, indicating that the video they have on their site now is anything but high quality, or even quality- by any measure. But of course, most people could care less as long as THEY can “get it”. If quality was an issue, then of course beta wouold have won the bets vs. vhs wars of the 80’s and we wouldn’t have to have the HD-DVD vs. Blu Ray debate of today, we’d have both “high quality” formats. But as David Pogue has put forward- who cares? Therefore, using the term HD in the same sentence with YoutTube is a complete misnomer.
HD - YouTube?
A direct contridiction
The internet is not ready for streaming HD. It just takes too much bandwidth.
480p is actually pretty damn nice for streaming video. But any improvement in resolution is good in my opinion, considering that currently, YouTube videos are about 2×2 pixels.
IanDanforth nailed it - quality should be measured by faithfulness to the uncompressed source. I’d much rather watch 480p in its original broadcast-ready quality than 1080p compressed all to hell.
you “cant help than wonder”? Man I wonder what that is like…
as till above mentioned, this is the second post about HD video with no mention of vimeo’s excellent pioneering work.
i think they deserve some credit.
Stage 6 rules above all…the future,,
Yeah, what constitutes HD video nowadays wouldn’t quite translate on the internet today. When you’re talking about 720p and 1080p resolutions, the file sizes and processing speeds necessary to view/store those files are well beyond what’s reasonable. Just getting “standard def” files on YouTube would greatly increase the quality of what they have now.
I also noticed that the videos I see on Google Video (direct) appear to be a higher resolution than that of YouTube.
@27: Vimeo is NYC based, TC prefers the silly valley.
Bandwidth is not the only limiting factor - storing HD video will take 4 times as much room per video for YouTube and their customers.
Not a show stopper by any means, but there is a cost beyond the time to download - just investing in enough space to keep it all.
Costs drop fast in the disk drive industry, but the vendors are collectively selling every drive they can make right now. Probably means the net cost to YouTube and others will be significantly higher than their current model.
Drive capacity typically grows at about 40% per year…will HD adoption take long enought to keep drive count neutral?
radical.
it’s all about bit rate folks… you can take a regular 480P size image, and make it look stupendously sharp because the compression was not as aggressive, or you can take an ‘HD’ 1080P image and have it all blocky due to poor or too aggressive compression techniques.
So it’s not about the size of the TV, the aspect ratio… its the bit rate that determines quality.