Although YouTube's goal, he said, is to make the site's vast library of content available to everyone, and that requires a fairly low-bitrate stream, the service is testing a player that detects the speed of the viewer's Net connection and serves up higher-quality video if viewers want it.Chen also confirmed that YouTube stores all videos in the native resolution in which it was sent, this means that all videos that were ever uploaded to YouTube may benefit from this.
Why wouldn't they? Because the need to buffer the video before it starts playing will change the experience. Hence the experiment, rather than just a rapid rollout of this technology. On stage, he said the current resolution of YouTube videos has been "good enough" for the site untill now.
YouTube to get higher-resolution video
Posted on Wednesday, November 21 2007 @ 2:25 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck