First impressions with Youtube Leanback are satisfactory. The recommendations provided were relevant to my interests and provided some decent surprises. The only issue that I have is that on the PC full screen doesn’t happen unless you f11 the browser, this is unacceptable.
I just want this on my xBox.
1. Loading Youtube pages faster
Feather Beta – http://www.youtube.com/feather_beta
By entering the Feather beta you will “lighten the load” Youtube has to load every-time a page refreshes. This beta significantly speeds up the Youtube experience, especially on slower machines.
2. Viewing videos restricted for those 18+ without logging in.
NSFW YouTube - http://nsfwYouTube.com
If you want to view a restricted/flagged video on YouTube but don’t feel to sign in, simply enter ” nsfw” before the link. *WARNING* The downside is that you will be subjected to pornographic ads. i.e.
http ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slz9MRK0s3o/
becomes…
http://www.NSFWyoutube.com/watch?v=Slz9MRK0s3o
Read More Post a comment (0)As of late, concern has risen about the H.264 codec. If you read the fine print on any video camera encodes natively to the format, it states that the footage may not be used for commercial purposes. The consortium that owns patents that make H.264, which includes heavy-weights such us Apple, Microsoft and Toshiba amongst about 30 others.
The Biz Media crew would much rather see an “open” standard, allowing anyone to use a codec without royalties. Google recently bought the VP8 Codec from ON2, this could be the open codec required to get around licensing fees.
This small article is certainly not doing justice to this issue. A Recent Engadget posting – Know Your Rights: H.264 and You does an absolutely fantastic job in explaining the issue in plan English. The Engadget article was in response to a very strongly worded piece called Why Our Civilization’s Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA.
“The video above demonstrates the comparative visual difference between VP8 and H.264 at the same datarate. The source videos were 1080p and encoded to H.264 (using build r915 of the x264 encoder, set to HQ 2 pass) and VP8 at a bitrate of 2mbps.”
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Watchout Netflix and Apple, YouTube is “unofficially” in the online video rental space. With a quiet debute today, YouTube opened YouTube.com/store, which if accessed from outside the U.S will bring you to someone’s vacant channel.
The biggest advantage Youtube will have in the rental space is its access to more independent/ non-movie content. Sure you can rent the latest blockbuster or even art films from Netflix but you can’t rent a semi-pro tutorial on how to use After Effects CS5. This monetization of amateurish content is part of the evolution of online video.
It will be a while before Youtube allows for non-movie or TV show content to be sold. It’s not hard to see its inevitability.
