Youtube 3D Video Player

YouTube introduced a stereoscopic player for watching videos in 3D. If you play a 3D video a drop-down menu will show options for red/cyan and amber/blue 3D glasses and some options that don't require glasses. Here's a brief overview video.



To enable the 3D player, you need to add the following tag to one of your videos: yt3d:enable=true. Peter Bradshaw, a Google employee, has more information about this experimental feature:

I'm the developer working on the stereoscopic player as a 20% project. It's currently very early, hence the silly bugs like swapping the eyes for the anaglyph modes. A fix for this is in the works.

The current tags are provisional and may change or expand. They are:

yt3d:enable=true Enables the view mode.
yt3d:aspect=3:4 Sets the aspect of the encoded video.
yt3d:swap=true Swaps the left and right sources. You may need to add this to videos when the player with fixed anaglyph modes ships.

You can try the new feature by searching for yt3d:enable=true.

HOME Movie Views Tops 1M on YouTube

HOME - the Film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand has been released on June 5th 2009 World Environment Day. For the first time ever, a film has been released on the same day in over 50 countries and on every format: movie theaters, TV, DVD and Internet.

The full Project HOME movie is available on YouTube in HD (1280×720 mp4 @ 2000 kbit/s) for free. It has reached one million views in 9 days. The network traffic to deliver the full 93 minutes of HOME HD is in the magnitude of a petabyte!

The plan was to show HOME Project on YouTube until 14th June but the date has been apparently extended. The download counter is close to 1.2 millions and counting. Thank you Yann Arthus-Bertrand, PPR and YouTube!

HOME on the iPhone

It is now possible to find out the latest news on the planet, calculate your carbon footprint or watch Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s film thanks on the iPhone thanks to a free application available on the Apple Store website.

HOME project - Free HD Earth Movie on YouTube

HOME - a Film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand (to be released on June 5th)


The French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand is well known for Earth from Above, a stunning collection of photographs that affords its viewers a window into the world's workings. He has wandered the globe to gather this collection of more than 200 uniformly striking photographs. His new project is a unique movie HOME. In his own words:

"We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth's climate.

The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being.

For this purpose, HOME needs to be free. A patron, the PPR Group, made this possible. EuropaCorp, the distributor, also pledged not to make any profit because Home is a non-profit film.

HOME has been made for you: share it! And act for the planet."

More than a movie, HOME will be a major event all over the globe: for the first time ever, a film will be released on the same day in over 50 countries and on every format: movie theaters, TV, DVD and Internet.

HOME project is available on YouTube in HD for free. Home is also available on DVD, Blu-ray formats and as a companion book - Home: A Hymn to the Planet and Humanity.

The free release of the first HD movie is another milestone for broadband internet innovations.

Amazon S3 for Video Hosting

In an earlier post I have written that the next YouTube could be built on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) by two guys in a dorm for roughly $0. It is indeed very easy to host videos on Amazon S3.

All you need to do is to sign up for an Amazon S3 account and upload your videos with the Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer (available here: S3Fox). To see this in action check out this interesting Amazon S3 video hosting tutorial by Perry Lawrence on YouTube.

You can simply include the hosted files in your web pages. However it is also possible to create nice web applications or mashups using the video content on S3. The book Amazon.com Mashups by Francis Shanahan will help developers to get familiar with Amazon Web Services. The examples in this book demonstrates how to integrate AWS with APIs from Yahoo!, eBay, Google and YouTube. Check out this sample chapter on the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) available at Wrox.

It has never been easier to create your own YouTube!

YouTube Architecture Unveiled

YouTube has grown rapidly to serve 100+ million videos per day. How could they manage this incredible growth? What is the architecture behind YouTube that supports this extreme scalability?

In this Google Tech Talk Cuong Do discusses the scalability challenges that have arisen during YouTube's short but extraordinary history. Cuong is currently an engineering manager at YouTube/Google. He was part of the engineering team that scaled the YouTube software and hardware infrastructure from its infancy to its current scale.

Interesting bits:

• Initial team consisted of 2 sysadmins, 2 architechts, 2 developers, 2 network engineers and a DBA
• Based on Apache, Python and MySQL
• Most popular content is moved to a CDN (content delivery network)
• Much more details in the video and notes...
  

The notes of the Tech Talk are also available on the High Scalability Blog.

iPhone shipping with YouTube

Users will soon enjoy YouTube on their iPhones when they begin shipping on June 29. The Apple-designed YouTube application will wirelessly stream content in the advanced H.264 format to iPhone over Wi-Fi or EDGE networks and play it on its stunning 3.5 inch display.

Apple excels in mobility with long battery life of the iPhone: it will feature up to 8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback or 24 hours of audio playback and up to 250 hours of standby time. Great news for heavy mobile internet and multimedia consumers!

Web Traffic Overtakes P2P

Peer-to-peer traffic dominated the Internet in the last 4 years. But web traffic has overtaken P2P for a while thanks to YouTube which represents nearly 10% of all traffic on the Net (that is ~1% attention of online users). Ellacoya estimates that presently, as a result of streaming audio and video in Web downloads, HTTP is 46% of all traffic on the network. P2P has a strong second place at 37% of total traffic. The rest:

• Newsgroups (9%)
• Non-HTTP video streaming (3%)
• Gaming (2%)
• VoIP (1%)

P2P could soon get a boost by Joost which can easily represent 2 GB of traffic per user per day.