YouTube Format IDs

throw0101d•about 2 hours ago

> HFR stands for "High Framerate", which means up to 60 FPS, whereas non-HFR is limited to 30 FPS

Personally I find most ((almost?) all?) >30fps generally unnecessary and just chews through bandwidth, monthly (mobile) data caps, and processing/batteries.

Are there specific cases where "HFR" videos are really improving the viewing experience of particular (types of) content?

(Note: in the table it's about support for HFR content, and does not necessarily mean that content is HFR.)

randomblock1•about 1 hour ago

Anything with motion. Sports, games, vlogs, and so on experience immense improvements. And it's not like it takes 2x the bandwidth, because inter-frame compression can be smarter about it. It's like 30-50% more bandwidth.

noir_lord•about 2 hours ago

Gaming footage/videos, some games are so fast they are noticeably better to play at (and watch at) 60fps over 30fps.

throw0101d•about 1 hour ago

I don't watch too many of those, and those few that I do are more 4X (Civ, Stellaris, etc), so that maybe that's why I don't notice it as an advantage for most of the content I see.

HPsquared•6 minutes ago

If there isn't much movement, it's probably a modest increase in bitrate anyway as the codec will see that most frames aren't changing.

mrob•about 1 hour ago

I'd personally rather watch 480p60 than 1080p30. There's a lot of material in which spatial resolution is mostly irrelevant (e.g. presentations, which involve people talking and slides designed to be legible from a distance), but low framerate always looks unnatural and distracting, even after speeding it up by 1.75x or 2x. 60fps should be considered a bare minimum, not "high framerate".

kccqzy•19 minutes ago

I’m the opposite. I take videos with 24fps, the standard for film. Lower frame rate gives me that film-like look which suggests sophistication, but 60fps feels like unedited screen grab or raw footage from a camcorder. I can’t explain it: it could be a case of acquired taste.

HPsquared•5 minutes ago

Same vibe as preferring black-and-white cinema, or analogue (and/or mono) audio.

dylan604•about 1 hour ago

Sports is a good use of HFR. Sadly, when HD broadcast came out, most broadcasters choose 1080i59.4 to remain compatible with the interlaced HD CRTs that were around. One of them chose 720p60 for sports. As cool as HD was, it still had interlacing as a boat anchor chained to it. 4K finally saw the elimination of interlacing, but that's veering way off topic.

For talking head/creator type of stuff, 24fps is probably wasted and could be just fine at 12/15fps.

Balooga•42 minutes ago

Fox Sports was 720p.

Back then, all broadcasters had to conform to ATSC 1.0 MPEG2 transport and MPEG2 encoding due to terrestrial broadcasts. The choices were 480i/p, 720p, or 1080i/p.

dopa42365•about 1 hour ago

>Are there specific cases where "HFR" videos are really improving the viewing experience of particular (types of) content?

Yes. Every single one. It's that simple.

throw0101d•20 minutes ago

> Yes. Every single one. It's that simple.

I've found that zero of the videos that I've ever seen that were 60fps improved things: certainly if I went full screen I could notice the resolution of 1080@60 versus 720@30, but in a standard browser window it was none.

throw0101d•about 2 hours ago

"4320p"? Huh:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8K_resolution

dylan604•about 1 hour ago

Just think of multiples of 1080p. 4K => 2160p and is 4x larger than HD. 8K => 4230p and is 16x larger than HD.

1080p of course is the height at the proper 16:9 aspect ratio of 1920 wide image. It just moves up from there keeping the same aspect.

RankingMember•about 2 hours ago

I feel like I'm missing some context. Cool that there's someone cataloging this though.

floam•about 2 hours ago

Same id numbers you use when downloading them. While you might know what a particular URL is available in, I’m not sure I’ve seen an encyclopedic enumeration of the possibilities

YouTube Format IDs

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Discussion (14 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews