YouTube Introduces 60fps Video Support

jones_supa (887896) writes Google's YouTube announced that it's adding two new features that will especially benefit people who enjoy watching gameplays and those who stream games live. Most excitingly, the site is rolling out 60 frames per second video playback. The company has a handful of videos from Battlefield Hardline and Titanfall (embedded in the article) that show what 60fps playback at high definition on YouTube looks like. As the another new feature, YouTube is also offering direct funding support for content creators — name-checking sites like Kickstarter and Patreon — and is allowing fans to 'contribute money to support your channel at any time, for any reason.' Adding the icing on the cake, the website has also a number of other random little features planned, including viewer-contributed subtitles, a library of sound effects and new interactive info cards.

caps and peering deals aslo

[Joe_Dragon]

let's say you have a good steem and then some say want to keep it you better give us an cut / fee or we will take some who will and your subs will have a hard time seeing your feed.

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[Luckyo]

Youtube accepts h.264, and going from 30fps to 60fps means increase in relatively small b-frames (frames which tell the difference between previous frame and current one) and likely few to no I-frames (large full picture frames).

As a result, file size likely won't go up all that much after encoding to h.264. Raw video output will double however, so if you can't encode on the fly, you will need double writing speed to long term storage.

LTE has the upload but caps are to low / $10 GB

[Joe_Dragon]

And at $10 GB makes the cost of doing it very high.

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[Your.Master]

Why?

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[Bengie]

Why do we waste so much money on cancer research when we could be feeding more people in a 3rd world country?

Anyway, it's easy for you to claim something is useless now, but then it becomes the next big thing. Most features won't pan out to be the next big thing, but if you don't try them, you'll never find out.

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[itzly]

It's not a google problem, it's an ISP problem.

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[dreamchaser]

Nobody is stopping you from watching videos on Youtube at a lower framerate.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Apart from requiring you to have a Google+ account just to remember your preference for video quality ... when said setting could be stored in a local cookie on your browser as it was for years before YouTube got fucked in the arse by Google.

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[Blaskowicz]

It's too late, people waste the pipe by using as their music player, and thus often their ONLY music player. And then the 1080p setting is useless already. 60 fps is something new at least.

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[itzly]

You can have a music player in less than 1.5 Mbps. That's only 5% of a decent "pipe".

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[dreamchaser]

I feel sorry for those using cable and the shared pipe it implies.

Re: Advances

[theslof]

There's a massive difference between a recorded frame and a rendered frame. Movies are shot at 24fps and get natural moron blur that blend each frame. Games don't get this, as each frame is rendered sharp. Therefore you can't compare movie fps to game fps.

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[GrahamCox]

natural moron blur

Nah, that's just too much tequila.

That's nice.

[newcastlejon]

Now if only YT could stop defaulting to 240p on every video I play...

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[Joe_Dragon]

YouTube Center for fire fox will let you fix that.

Youtube is mostly crap

[Anonymous Coward]

People could explain something with 3 lines of text, but instead they'll make a 20 minute video about it.

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[radarskiy]

Ted Sturgeon, is that you?

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[westlake]

People could explain something with 3 lines of text, but instead they'll make a 20 minute video about it.

100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Statistics [youtube.com] I'm sure you'll find something worth watching. As for explaining things in three lines of text, try it sometime with someone who has not mastered your own specialty.

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[tlhIngan]

As for explaining things in three lines of text, try it sometime with someone who has not mastered your own specialty.

How about sitting through a 20 minute review of something that could be skimmed or read with far more detail?

The problem with video is people think "it's easy" compared to say, writing it out in text. It isn't.

In fact, to produce a video should require FAR more effort if you want to do something that's not just "hey look at this cool thing" that can be shot on a smartphone and shown in less

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[AmiMoJo]

Like TV and the internet in general most of it if crap, but there is some really good stuff too that more than offsets that. Eevblog, for example.

Firefox + 60fps = No Go

[rsmith-mac]

Unfortunately YouTube's 60fps support pokes a pretty big hole in the current state of Firefox.

To play back 60fps videos you need to be using the HTML5 player and stream the 1080p version. The Flash player will not work here.

The problem? Firefox doesn't support Media Source Extensions [w3.org], which is what YouTube uses for DASH adaptive streaming [ghacks.net]. Mozilla's developers are working on the matter, but only for WebM [mozilla.org] for now. H.264/MP4 MSE support will have to wait.

The end result is that 1080p60 playback works great on Chrome, Safari, and even IE11, but is all but useless on Firefox.

I don't want to slag the Firefox devs too badly (hey, it's a free browser), but once again FOSS orthodoxy is getting in the way of practical feature development. H.264 support took an embarrassingly long time to come, and now Firefox is the only browser that that can't play back 1080p60 on YouTube.

Between this and their constant attempts to turn Firefox into a Chrome-alike, it's getting harder and harder to justify using Firefox.

The demo videos play just fine on Firefox.

[master_p]

On my setup, Windows 7, Firefox 30, the demo videos display just fine in 60 fps, 1080 p, using Flash.

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[issicus]

i get 8 fps at 1080 and around 35 at 720 and under in firefox. and fraps didn't work with chrome but the 1080 stream did work.

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[PJ6]

I don't want to slag the Firefox devs too badly (hey, it's a free browser)

I wouldn't feel too bad about slagging them, they deserve it.

They've spent their development time screwing up the UI [malwaretips.com] instead of working on a major 13 year old bug that's annoyed everyone since its release [mozilla.org].

60 fps?

[Anonymous Coward]

there must be some high quality or fast video format that I am not aware of. TV shows are filmed at 29.97 FPS and movies are at 23.976 FPS.

Re: 60 fps?

[Anonymous Coward]

Before the advent of HDTV, TV shows were regularly shot at 60Hz. Sure, it may have been interlaced, but when you deinterlace to 30fps you are irreparably throwing away half of your temporal resolution. Deinterlacing to 60fps, on the other hand, creates a nice fluid video that retains all of the temporal resolution.

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[wonkey_monkey]

Before the advent of HDTV, TV shows were regularly shot at 60Hz.

Uh... HDTV has nothing to do with it. Lots of shows were shot at 60Hz before, and those same kinds of shows (sports, news, "real" stuff) are still being shot at 60Hz.

Youtube isn't for TV

[Sycraft-fu]

There is lots on there. A big bit of content that'll do 60fps no problem is video games. Lots of channels that feature games in various forms. So they'll be able to show content at 60fps no issue.

Also many AVCHD cameras do 60fps these days. It is part of the AVCHD 2.0 spec, but some like Panasonic did it before the spec update. So a lot of individuals have cameras that'll shoot 60fps no issue, and if Youtube will take it, they can upload it as is.

Re:60 fps?

[Stormwatch]

Yes, movies are shot at 24FPS. Isn't that horrible? We have sound and color, but we're still using that same piss-poor framerate from the silent movie era!

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[FlyHelicopters]

Yes, and directors have been using tricks and fancy effects for many years to compensate for the slow 24fps.

They should have gone to 60fps many years ago.

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[humanaceous]

Perhaps I'm a curmudgeon, but I actually prefer 24 FPS for movies and live action television. There's an otherworldly, dreamy-ish quality to it. I do like to shoot at 60 FPS and then conform it to a 24 fps timeline. But 60 FPS live action looks too much like home video, or old Doctor Who episodes. The first Hobbit movie had that problem @ 48 FPS and other issues. Gandalf's cast resin staff actually LOOKED like cast resin. The second Hobbit movie had less of that, but PJ had to employ various post production

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[dinfinity]

AFAIK, GoT wasn't filmed at 60fps. Even if the broadcast format is 1080x60/30, it is just displaying (~)24fps using pulldown techniques.

Having said that, the rest of your comment is accurate. There is plenty of true 50/60fps material out there.

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[wonkey_monkey]

AFAIK, GoT wasn't filmed at 60fps.

True. What you actually end up with (AIUI) is 24fps-shot video, pulled down to 60fps (interlaced) for broadcast - since it's preferable for channels to stick to one broadcast format rather than continuously changing depending on what they're currently broadcasting - which then gets pulled back up to 24fps by your TV to get rid of the pulldown judder it detects, and which you would otherwise see on your screen (due to the AA-BBB repetition).

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[wonkey_monkey]

as are some movies (some are filmed at 48fps).

If by "some" you mean "three." And one of those isn't out yet.

Works on TiVo

[Burdell]

I just tried the Titanfall video on my TiVo's Youtube app and I did get 59.97 fps (TiVo is set to pass-through 1080p, and TV switches from 23.97 fps to 59.97 fps for this video).

Too bad Framefree never caught on

[Animats]

There's a way to do video compression so that frame rate doesn't matter. It's called Framefree. [memberclicks.net] (PowerPoint, unfortunately). With that, you can crank up the playback frame rate as high as the output device can go.

Framefree was developed at Kerner Optical, which was spun off from Lucasfilm. Kerner went out of business a few years ago, and although there was a web site "framefree.us" and even a browser plug-in, it never caught on.

The idea is that the intermediate frames between key frames are mesh-based morphs, rather than MPEG-type block updates. Compression is compute-intensive, and playback requires a GPU. You can generate as many intermediate frames between keyframes as you want. Intermediate frame generation means interpolating the mesh points and then warping the image pieces to fit. So not only can you have very high display frame rates, you can also have ultra-slow slow motion. No MPEG-type blockiness, either.

While Framefree compression never caught on (probably because a high performance GPU in every set top box and DVD player was too expensive back then) the technology is used in sports programming to generate ultra-slow slow motion without using ultra-high frame rate cameras. Maybe it will make a comeback in the era of "4K" video with 60FPS frame rates.

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[jones_supa]

Wow, that sounds quite cool.

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[wonkey_monkey]

While it presumably does help to have some nice clean mesh data from the original video, decompressed video can be interpolated pretty well by modern TVs. Sure, it fails at high speeds, but presumably Framefree wouldn't get it right under all circumstances either.

In any case, if you don't have a real input frame at the chosen moment of time, whatever gets displayed is going to be an estimation however you do it. Sending real 60fps video is always going to win out over interpolating 30fps, so to say "frame r

How about fixing the site first?

[hackertourist]

When I open youtube.com or do a search, Firefox hangs for 90 seconds while loading the page. When playing a video, moving the playback point usually results in a black screen. Playback stutters way too often.

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[CastrTroy]

This. Youtube isn't much good for watching anything other than short clips because it will often stop playing in the middle of a video, and be unrecoverable without reloading the whole page, and then you have to search for where you were. I have a fast connection, Netflix and other video sites have no problems. I can download a 2 hour movie in 10 minutes on bit torrent. But for some reason Youtube can't play 360p videos properly.

Something has frozen over.

[Twinbee]

Hell has frozen over. I've been anticipating standard 60fps support on Youtube for years and it's finally come. My bitterness is gradually fading...

I wonder if existing videos at 60fps already on Youtube will be adjusted to support the feature.

And for those of us outside the old NTSC areas

[mfraz74]

How about some 50fps videos? Actually, I'd settle for 25fps.

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[jones_supa]

These days most LCD panels are 60Hz, so it makes sense to go with 60fps.

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[wonkey_monkey]

No, that doesn't make sense - not if your source video is 50fps (I assume GP was asking for it in addition to 60fps, not instead of). If your input video is 50fps, you should keep it at 50fps. You won't make it look any better on a 60Hz panel just by converting it to 60fps (unless you're going to do some fancy motion-compensation thing, which I doubt YouTube will, and will in any case not work brilliantly all the time), and in fact you'll end up making it worse on at any other display frequency, including 5

Not on Linux it isn't

[psyopper]

Ubuntu 14.04 still only plays at 10 FPS in full screen mode. Bastards. Every streaming video site *except* YouTube plays flawlessly in full screen mode.

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[Bengie]

Wow, that sucks. I was instantly able to watch 1080p with no buffering. 100mb/s for a few seconds then half of the time-line was buffered about 5 seconds after I clicked play. Too bad my ISP doesn't have a YouTube CDN. My YouTube comes from a PoP in Chicago over my ISP's transit.

I wonder how fast YouTube really is. If only I could afford the faster tiers, even if just to test.

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[ogl_codemonkey]

Certainly doesn't seem to; they've just halved the bits-per-frame by the look of it.

The image quality is just... awful.

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[DemoLiter3]

I've downloaded the Titanfall Gameplay video and mplayer definitely says it's 30 fps, so I'm guessing it's bullshit.
VIDEO: [H264] 1280x720 24bpp 30.000 fps 3000.0 kbps (366.2 kbyte/s) Also, even if it worked - what's the point of having a 60 fps video for a console game that can barely get 30?

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[StankeyoSmith]

I've downloaded the Titanfall Gameplay video and mplayer definitely says it's 30 fps, so I'm guessing it's bullshit.

VIDEO: [H264] 1280x720 24bpp 30.000 fps 3000.0 kbps (366.2 kbyte/s)
Also, even if it worked - what's the point of having a 60 fps video for a console game that can barely get 30?

WTF, why are you going on about some video file you downloaded?
The article talks about YOUTUBE support for 60fps videos.

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[FlyHelicopters]

He is talking about the fact that you can download, more or less, any video from YouTube using a third party web site...

But those web sites don't always have access to every version of the video on YouTube and in this case, for sure don't have access to the 60fps versions...

So he is watching the 60fps version on the web site and downloading the 30fps version and getting all confused...

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[tapi0]

I get 'stats for nerds' but no FPS figure is shown. Wonder if it depends on the stream?

I see Video ID, Dimensions, Resolution, Volume, Stream Type, Mime Type, DASH, and Bandwidth.

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[mister_playboy]

He downloaded the video so he could look at its technical data. I watch many YT videos, but I never stream them.

Streaming seems aimed at the impatient, but I think it takes more patience to sit through buffering than to download the whole thing and then watch.

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[Narishma]

Youtube has different versions of each video in different formats and/or different resolutions. So it really depends of which one he downloaded.

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[ArchieBunker]

Then links to videos that are supposed to demonstrate 60fps except they don't appear to.

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[Mashiki]

Must be from consoles because they "support silky smooth 30fps" this includes as a marketing point. And 60fps is "too much for the human eye to handle," as droves of console users say. So no big surprise, they're just catering to them.

For 2D games too

[tepples]

Games for classic game consoles (Atari 2600, NES, Genesis, Super NES) routinely keep a stable 60 fps.

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[Rastignac]

Note that Atari VCS 2600 can only do 60 fps (NTSC) or 50 fps (PAL/SECAM). It can't slow down, because this console's display is pure real time (aka "racing the beam"). All the other consoles were able to slow down when needed, but 2600 was 100% stable.

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[tepples]

Display on the 2600 is pure real time. Logic processing during vertical blanking, not so much.

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[tepples]

Some games slow down when too much logic executes. Other games run at full speed but still can't display all objects every frame because of overdraw limits in the VDP.

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[jones_supa]

What does VDP mean?

VDC/VDP defined

[tepples]

VDP (Video Display Processor) or VDC (Video Display Controller) is a term used for the Commodore 64 VIC-II, the TMS9918A VDC in the ColecoVision, CreatiVision, and MSX, the Master System VDP, the Game Gear VDP, the Sega Genesis VDP, the NES PPU, the Super NES PPU, and similar chips that operate by overlaying sprites on top of a grid of tiles.

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[tepples]

Old consoles had two sprite limits: number of sprites per screen and number of sprites per horizontal scanline. Games would routinely momentarily exceed the latter.

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[rsmith-mac]

Only 1080p videos support 60fps. Presumably Google's logic is that if you don't have the bandwidth to support 1080p, then you also don't have the bandwidth to support 60fps.

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[zenith1111]

I've just watched the video in the article, 720p videos also clearly play at 60fps. 480 and lower all played at 30fps.

The video bitrate was around 4 or 5 mbps, maybe they will add a 30/60 fps selector in the future?

I was waiting for this for some time :)

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[tepples]

Presumably Google's logic is that if you don't have the bandwidth to support 1080p, then you also don't have the bandwidth to support 60fps.

My PlayStation doesn't support anywhere near 1080p, yet it gets silky smooth 60fps in the fighting game [i]Tobal No. 1[/i].

Frame interpolation

[mapuche]

Maybe the videos are 30FPS but the player is doing some interpolation to achieve 60FPS, like modern TV displays.

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[Mister Liberty]

Don't tell me there is no capitalistic market principle here, one that
should be promising, that thus far has went unnoticed by you!

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[dreamchaser]

I have Verizon FIOS and I haven't had a single problem with Youtube, or Netflix for that matter.

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[dccase]

News for nerds: FCC chairman Tom Wheeler's Slashdot handle is "dreamchaser".

I can't think of another explanation for why Youtube isn't throttled for you.

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[dreamchaser]

Oh please...stop with the FUD. I've yet to see any evidence of throttling. Now it could be because I have FIOS Quantum and an over 80 Mbps connection, but like I said I have no issues. Also, I work in IT security as a consultant, not for the FCC so you can stop with the insults :)

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[dccase]

I take it back. I only have the 50Mbs.
It was a nice boost over the previous 15Mbs. For everything except Youtube.

Usually the first couple videos play well, but after that... Long pauses every few seconds.
I look forward to the new 6fps mode.

Sorry. No one deserves being called a FCC commissioner.

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[dreamchaser]

I LOL'd, don't worry. I would have modded your original retort as Funny were it not for obvious reasons (having already posted in the thread).

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[Hsien-Ko]

I'm waiting for the obligatory nutcase to drop an insane "human eye can't see more than 30fps" comment.

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[dltaylor]

Ran some tests back when CRTs commonly had >80FPS capability and we had enough computer power to run them. For most of the test subjects 85 was about all that they could readily discern. There were some, though, that could see the benefit at 100.

It's kind of like the IndyCar ad on NBCSN, where the passenger is mostly screaming and Mario Andretti (CART, F1 champ, Indianapolis 500, NASCAR winner, amoung the items on his resume) is observing the dandelions in the infield and the ladies in the stands, appa

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[Concerned Onlooker]

"I'm waiting for the obligatory nutcase to drop an insane "human eye can't see more than 30fps" comment."

Actually, I just checked the frame rate and reality only runs at 48 fps, tops. Anything higher is just theoretical.

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[itzly]

If your eye is tracking a moving object on the screen you'll need much higher frame rate to see it without motion blur.

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[Concerned Onlooker]

It was a joke. Read carefully.

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[Anonymous Coward]

At 9 ft from a 72 Inch Flatscreen with 720 dpi and 30 fps video the human eye will be completely satisfied and won't be able to see an improvement of 1080 dpi and 60 fps will be unreal to watch. Still, they keep selling the technology that more is more when its not, and they know damn well they have reached the limit of saturation with our human function.

Do you by chance design game consoles?

Re: Saturating the human visual capability

[Anonymous Coward]

60fps is unreal to watch? Try telling that to all the people who grew up watching NTSC.

Soap opera

[tepples]

People who grew up wtih NTSC associate high-motion video with soap opera writing and soap opera acting.

I was referring to scripted programming

[tepples]

You are correct. Please allow me to amend my assertion: Though high motion is the rule for live news and sports programming, people associate high motion scripted programming with soap operas.

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[terrab0t]

More than that, Google is buying Twitch.tv [arstechnica.com]. Adding these new features matches both Twitch.tv's video quality and viewer donation feature. This makes perfect sense if they are planning to buy them and partner more closely.

Hopefully they won't make the same mistake again by trying to link all Twitch.tv users to a Google+ account and generally break things.

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[GNious]

Something broke when they started unifying their platforms?

I know things changed when they did this with YouTube and G+, and there were apparently a ton of video-posts complaining about things changing, but I never personally saw anything that actually broke.

Disclaimer: I'm not a YouTube "content creator", nor a daily user of YouTube. I do use G+, and I do appreciate not having separate accounts for G+, GMail, YouTube, AdWords, Google Analytics etc (though, in reality, some of those are still separate accou

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[UnknownSoldier]

Total nonsense

OWE my eyes @ 24 fps !
âhttp://red.cachefly.net/learn/panning-24fps-180.mp4ââ

Silky smooth @ 60 fps !â
http://red.cachefly.net/learn/... [cachefly.net]

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[UnknownSoldier]

grr, fixed the 24 fps link

http://red.cachefly.net/learn/... [cachefly.net]

--
Fuck /. "Slow down Cowboy!" and its 5 minute timer for re-posting

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[ledow]

That just proves (poorly) that the boundary lies somewhere between 24 and 60. Not that 60 is required.

And, to be honest, a lot of things affect it - hell, even the local mains frequency can affect what hardware does and how it reacts at 50 or 60Hz.

You could have just used a codec that's not designed with 24fps in mind, or a poor implementation of that codec.

But, that said, the difference is minor, and on an animated "slew" rather than real-world video (YouTube isn't going to be showing much left-right 3D a

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[UnknownSoldier]

There is a massive difference between 60 Hz and 120 Hz for gaming. Especially with LightBoost active. I agree that 30 fps is good enough for most gamers. I can instantly tell when a game fluctuates between 30 and 60 Hz. It looks choppy.

Is 24 fps film good enough? For most people yeah. Again film at 24 fps looks like total shit for me. 60 Hz is silky smooth. I estimate the upper end is around 96 - 120 Hz for film.

Cartoons don't usually have pans. Some of them look stuttery as hell too (due to only being ani

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[wonkey_monkey]

(British TV was only ever 50Hz, with sometimes 25fps, until digitisation).

I'm not sure what you mean about "until digitisation." Going digital had little to no effect on how shows in the UK are shot and broadcast (in terms of FPS), which is still a mix of 50i and 25p.

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[ledow]

We're no longer bound to PAL standards like we were - the MPEG decoders in whatever you're using nowadays can handle any framerate you would find, but yes, a lot of content is still in legacy formats and used without changes.

But there's no REASON to any more. Any display device you find will do 50 or 60, whichever you throw at it.

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[wonkey_monkey]

Yes... but that hasn't made any difference to the actual situation. British TV still is only ever 50Hz.

"25p" looking-stuff - higher dramas, films, etc - is still also all actually 50i (50Hz).

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[ledow]

That's alright. It'll just point out those people who think they can see a difference on their PC screen anyway - when they all start yelling baout "how much better" it looks, and then are told that it was only 30fps because of the Flash issue, we can just write them off as idiots anyway.

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[Narishma]

That's not true. It's playing for me just fine at 60 fps (or rather it's fluctuating between 30 and 50) in Chrome with the Flash player (I've disabled the HTML5 player because it doesn't do hardware acceleration for some reason on my laptop).

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[jones_supa]

Submitter here, thanks for the feedback. For me to be able to continue delivering high-quality content to you in future, can you describe more accurately what the problem is with the sentence? Please notice that in the beginning of the summary, "two new features" is mentioned.

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[Anonymous Coward]

It's a minor typo, right in the phrase that he quoted:

"As the another new feature"

'another' should be 'other'. More commonly it would read "As for the other new feature,".

'the other' for the second of 2 items; 'another' for a non enumerated "aditional" item.

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[jones_supa]

Ok, that certainly makes sense. Thanks.