Over The last few months there have been a number of improvements to the videos on YouTube. Here ares a few tips to help you see them at their best. Watch in High Definition (HD) at full screen Press the button with 4 arrows on it below the bottom right hand corner of the video to get full screen. To the left of that is a number (probably 360p). Select that and you get more numbers, 480p and possibly 720p. These are different resolutions - the higher the number, the higher the resolution. [To put these into context, broadcast analogue TV is 480p, digital TV can be 720p or 1080p. This doesn’t mean the picture quality on YouTube is as good as broadcast TV – there are other factors than resolution. They’re still pretty good though]. Why does the picture keep stopping? HD pictures contain much more information, and so take longer to download. If the download speed isn’t fast enough the computer has to periodically stop and wait. This will depend on your broadband speed and other factors such as how busy the network is. It’s usually worse in an evening when the network traffic is higher. If your broadband connection is much less than 3Mbps you might get this problem. Fortunately it’s easy to get round. There are two ways: 1.Choose a lower resolution – 480p might well solve the problem without much loss of picture quality. 2.Stick with the higher resolution and click the pause button (two vertical lines under the bottom left hand corner). This will stop the video playback, but not the download. You can see what’s happening on the red bar under the picture which shows the progress of the download. The circle on it shows where the playback has got to. When the red line had built up a good lead, you can start it again (same button which now is now a start button). If you’ve judged right the playback will never catch up with the download so the picture won’t stop. Or you can go and do something else and come back when the download has finished. Replaying Once the video is downloaded you can replay it using the start button. (it will play from the PC’s memory so doesn’t need to download again). If you click somewhere on the red line it will start playing from there, so you can just replay the interesting bits (if there are any). With a bit of luck it will stay on your PC till you go to another page – then it disappears. To watch again it will have to download again. Is it possible to download to a file? A while ago I used to send a copy to a file sharing site (data file host) so that anyone could download it in higher quality than YouTube supported then, and do things such a slow motion and frame-by-frame. Now, the YouTube pictures are just as good, and the HD files are too big (data file host supports up to 25MB – the latest files have been over 300MB). It is now possible to download from YouTube but they are in MP4 format, which is OK for hand held devices but quite poor on a decent sized screen. It you want to do it there are several ways - try googling “youtube download”. If you get stuck, you can ask me. YouTube Processing delay When the videos are uploaded to YouTube, they are usually available quite quickly, typically a few minutes, but then only in very low quality. This is obvious from the quality, but also there is no resolution number below the picture. It’s OK for the summary (it doesn’t matter if Ken’s a bit blurred), but for the match action it’s better to wait a while. When YouTube finish processing (can be 2 hours or more) the video comes up in high quality. When will the videos be on YouTube? The priority is to get Ken’s summary available asap. It’s usually there an hour or two after the game ends (for home games – later for away). Things can go wrong so occasionally it might be later. The match video will normally be the next day – hopefully by afternoon, but there are even more things to go wrong. The written report will also usually be the next day. Comments, Questions, Suggestions If you’ve any comments, questions, suggestions (perhaps not any suggestions), things you like about the videos, things you don’t like, how they could be improved, please feel free to get in touch. Using the comments feature on YouTube would be best so others can join in. Alternatively e-mail cuthbury@tiscali.co.uk.
