YouTube and HD

By Jim on December 8th, 2008

I’ve been checking out some of YouTube’s new HD stuff and I’m liking it a lot! If you haven’t see what it looks like then check it out.

Late Thursday night YouTube quietly added the option to watch videos in high definition (HD) without the need for any URL hacks. On any uploaded videos that are wider than 720 pixels, users will see a new option to “watch in HD” where the “watch in high quality” option usually appears.

In addition to the quality change in the player, YouTube has updated the embed options to let users chose one of four different sizes–all the way up to 640×505 pixels. There is still no option to embed the video in HD (officially), but you can accomplish this using the method we posted a few weeks back. Also worth noting is that there’s not yet an option to automatically have the HD version play, something which you could tweak in your account settings with the introduction of higher quality clips.

YouTube: Normal and in HD Format

So far, so good with this. It was quite smooth on my iMac via my cable broadband. I’m liking the way stuff looks a lot. However, there is one disturbing element to it. When video is in HD sometimes we see too much! If you’ve ever noticed people’s…er…skin blemishes and other things in a close-up in HD you know what I mean.

Can you imagine how scary it will be to see some of the people on YouTube in HD? In close-ups?