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. 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:

Videos previously shot and uploaded at 60 FPS, 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 would have to re-process, however, I wouldn’t bank on old stuff getting the upgrade treatment.

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/oVOW1jFXwc0/

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