I am not one to talk out against the most fantastic company in the world, Apple, in fact I generally try to stay away from conversations that will end up with Apple being the losing party, and this doesn't happen often by the way, but in this case I must say that they could do better on a few points. I own one of apples most well known devices, the iPad, and I have been using this for my YouTube needs, but the pre-installed YouTube app just doesn't have the same comprehensiveness as the web site. For instance, on the YouTube web site you have the option of viewing videos at a desired quality, where as on the iPad you automatically get 720p or the highest quality the video is in, I blame this mainly for my Internet usage.
I began watching YouTube on my computer instead so I could pick the quality and that made wonder just how my I was using per minute of YouTube, after some Googleing it was clear that no one really knew how much it was per minute, so I decided to figure it out my self.
Working on the basis that when you upload a video to YouTube it converts it into .flv video and then converts down from what ever quality it was uploaded as.
e.g. I upload a .mp4 video to YouTube at 1080p, Youtube then converts it to .flv at 1080p, then 720p, then 480p, then 360p and finally 240p.
So in theory it doesn't matter if I'm in Turky and I upload a .avi at 1080p that is 2 minutes long, and someone else in the US uploads a .mkv at 1080p that is 1 minute long, the file size per minute is exactly the same.
I have rambled on for far to long so here it is,
1 minute at 240p = 3.4mb
1 minute at 360p = 6.4mb
1 minute at 480p = 9.3mb
1 minute at 720p = 19.7mb
1 minute at 1080p = 36.9mb
So if I watch 1 hour of 1080p video on YouTube I will use 2.1gb of downloads! Thats where my Internet allowance has been going!
The only this that may chuck in a veritable is sound, but even then is is converted to the same quality across the board and would only change the results by 200kbs or so per minute.
These results where taken on the 27/1/11 and may change over time.
The T
There's this important thing in video encoding called bitrate (a 240p video with the same bitrate as a 1080p video SHOULD actually have the same filesize).
ReplyDeleteA dark scene usually has a different filesize from a bright or colored scene and with modern encoding algorithms scene changes play a big role.
So the 1 minute of 1080p will actually vary in filesize unless it's the same video. (Assuming that Youtube uses variable bitrate encoding, which without looking it up is very likely since it is the best tradeoff between quallity and filesize).
I assume you didn't take the average of several videos you watched but just one, and honestly I don't care. It's just something I wanted to mention.
Nonetheless it's a good starting point to get a grasp on filesizes of compressed youtube video.
So, thank you.
Ps: comment previes are broken on your site.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#endnote_media_type_table_note_1
ReplyDelete