Blu-ray discs rotting?

Reports are coming in that Blu Ray discs, in particular the film The Prestige are suffering from disc rot. Video producers have waited a long time for a practical HD distribution format, and then the corporations fumble with the HD-DVD/Blu Ray format war.

Blu Ray appeared to be winning (if only becuase the PS3 with built in Blu Ray playback meant more players for that format have been sold) but this may throw a spanner in the works and halt the format's forward march. I can say I would think twice about buying a format that exhibited this kind of flaw. Is it only a single batch that is affected (as is implied by the fact that so far only The Prestige seems to have the problem)?

Safari for PC

The Apple web browser Safari is now available for Windows. It's a public beta and still very buggy (it crashes a lot on my work PC) but is the simplest and easiest way to dowload or find the link for Youtube videos if you want to embed them with Jeroen Wijering's superior JW FLV Player instead of the YouTube embedded player, as described in a previous post.

If you open the activity window, the largest file, and one that;sporgressively downloading, will be the flash video file (it;s usually a few megabytes, depending on the running time of the video. Double click on it and it will download to Safari's chosen download folder (by default, the desktop). You'll need to add the .flv suffix; this file will play in VLC player. At this point you can't copy/paste from the PC version of Safari's activity window, but if you want to find the location of the original flash video file, then you can do it with this website: keepvid.com You simply copy the address in the "URL" textbox on the YouTube page, and paste it into the download text box on the Keepvid page. Click "download" and the Keepvid will then show a direct link to the page. right click (or CRTL+click for one button mouse users) on the >>Download link<< and copy the link location. You'll get an address somthing like http://chi-v18.chi.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=ZFQ6FLP2GHo. Paste this link into the "file" variable when using the JW FLV player, adding ".flv" as an extension to the end. You can even make the file on YouTube private so it can't be seen via youtube, only on your own website.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, I don't even play one on TV, but I can't see anywhere that this violates YouTube's terms of use, though I can't imagine they WANT you to do this. However in terms of the features it adds to video playback I think it's worth doing, until I'm told to cease and desist.

RE: YouTube on AppleTV, follow up..

Well, here's the answer.... Apple isn't installing flash on AppleTV; Youtube will re-encode all its content to the h.264 codec.

Now if only there were some specs on what quality that would be to. Is it larger than the 320x240 currently employed by YouTube? Allegedly 16:9 clips now play in full screen, but is it a proper 16:9 raster (eg 480x272 pixels) or anamorphically distorted from a 4:3 resolution? Is there a way (or a hack) to embed these h.264 clips in websites? For example Revver currently offers both Quicktime and flash as embeds, will YouTube offer that too? Would Apple let them? Quicktime may want to offer YouTube clips at a higher quality (gosh, what an incentive!) for AppleTV customers only, but alternatively could see a way of using Youtube to get Quicktime into even more computers.

Souces:
www.ilounge.com
www.AppleTVhacker.com

Youtube on AppleTV

I found this link via Cinematech. Steve Jobs announces that AppleTV will start streaming Youtube videos. This is interesting as at last, there is a simple hardware way of getting Youtube content onto a TV. A few weeks ago, a hack was announced for the AppleTV that allowed you to watch Youtube vids on a TV. However the problem was that you would be limited to browsing the most popular vids. The What's not clear at the moment is how these videos will be stored and played back.

AppleTV is quicktime based, and the above plug in uses a hack to playback Youtube's FLV files. Will the Youtube for AppleTV files be re-encoded in quicktime? Will they be available at (potentially) higher quality (say comparable to Revver which hosts vids at 480*360 for 4:3 and 600*360 for 16:9 at around 700Kbs?) Steve Jobs is right when he says that the limiting factor for Youtube vids is the quality of the original footage (I made a similar point in my previous post). However that's not the case with all material.

The Apple press release (primarily for a new bigger capacity model of the AppleTV) states "Thousands of the most current and popular YouTube videos will be available on Apple TV at launch in mid-June, with YouTube adding thousands more each week until the full YouTube catalog is available this fall." this staggered roll out implies something other than Youtube's website being plugged into iTunes.

SO if higher quality Quicktime files ARE able to be posted on websites, will non-AppleTV users be able to access them (other than via hacking) - will the content owner be able to offer higher quality QT versions of their clips for embedding? One thought: Youtube is now offering revenue sharing with certain content producing partners. Will these partners be able to have higher quality clips than Joe or Jo Public?