YouTube Can Now Play Videos At A Buttery 60 Frames Per Second

After years of capping video playback at 30 frames per second, it looks like YouTube is finally upping the bar.

Back in June, YouTube announced that 60 FPS video playback was on the way in “the coming months”. Alas, the only examples of this to pop up since were a handful of EA game trailers that YouTube handpicked to showcase the new, ultra-slick framerate.

Sometime in the past few hours, however, it seems the roll out started spreading far and wide. A good number of user uploaded videos shot at 60 FPS are now playing back at their proper framerate, rather than being sliced down to a relatively chunky 30 FPS.

It may not work in all browsers (if all else fails, try Chrome. Safari also seems to work. And make sure you’re using the HTML5 Player, though most people will be on that by default by now) — but when it works, it’s gloriously obvious.

See, for example, this video of someone playing Nintendo’s Mario Kart 8 (as spotted by Kotaku). Bump the quality up to at least 720p, and let the frames flood your eyeballs:

(On a side note: holy crap that guy is a beast at Mario Kart)

Videos previously shot at 60 FPS but uploaded before today, however, still seem to be playing at the older framerate.

We’ve reached out to YouTube to find out just how widespread this roll out is (Can all users upload at 60 FPS now, or just many more than before?), and whether or not they plan to re-process any of the old stuff uploaded before they made the switch. Given the absurd amount of video that YouTube has backlogged, however, I wouldn’t bank on much of that old stuff getting the upgrade treatment.

Update: YouTube has confirmed to us that this is, in fact, rolling out to users and promised “more details soon”, but wouldn’t say more just yet.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Kiran Upadhyay

Search This Blog