I just browsing around their blog and found out that youtube now supports up to 4k resolution, which i cant play on my computer in obvious reasons

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Watch Some Clips Here

Hi Salti,

that is nice, but instead of introducing 4k, which is totally useless for home applcations, they should double (or even triple) their bitrates for 720p or 1080p content to get real HD instead of this mushy wannabeHD at 2MBits. Decent encoding settings instead of ultra fast ones would be the icing on the cake to get a decent image quality.
I just watched a clip and of course the 4k one is as bitrate starved as everything else on Youtube, every decent 2k clip is totally superior in terms of real resolution, detail retention and blocking.

There is a free 4k source floating around.
I cannot find it at the moment, but you can search for a encode of it. I don't know if the encode is legal (it should be), but to be on the safe side I will just post the name of it:
"Crowd Run 2160p UHD CRF22 x264-CtrlHD.mkv"
Maybe somebody wants to upload it to Youtube to compare the Youtube video frame by frame with the source. I would do it, but i don't want to create an account solely for this purpose.

Best Regards
David

You're totally right about the lack of bit rate, but higher bitrate needs more CPU a really more CPU time. Which a lot of us doesn't have, and that means this is not the you tube business model. All are driven by the money

I can definately play 1080p @30Mbit/s on my small laptop, which has hardware acceleration like basically every computer sold in the last 18 months, but I have a hard time playing 4k on my powerful quad core desktop PC.
I really would like to see Vimeo compete with them image quality wise, unfortunately their Pro accounts offer very little IQ for the 60$ you pay per year...

Best Regards
David

Hi David!
Also a good video card would help for better timings in full HD playback or 2k, 4k..its a need i might say. I guess playing clips in such notebooks are useless, its okay for short clips like what we've doing here, but playing full feature movie like Band Of Brothers for instance, you may experience some difficulties after 10-15 minutes playback, audio out of sync and so on, not to mention how many of these monitors supports full HD resolution. You can test for yourself it is not energy efficient, i hardly doubt the battery will stand up alone for full movie, the CPUs will be reaching its limits in temperature wise because of its usage. I just imagine a pain .